Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2024/25 (98) i Oxford Poetry

I was talking to a friend recently about poetry and horses. The question we were discussing was this: if horses and humans had not evolved in such close quarters, would we still hear the anapestic foot as propulsive and urgent? Or would we be teaching a version of prosody in which anapestic metre gives a poem a stumbling broken quality, or a silly clownish one, or something else? It seems to me that if we undid horses from the earth, and from our memory, the meaning of the anapest would be entirely up for grabs. I can imagine, for example, an animal who runs on seven legs, none of which are equal in length and some of which atomically disintegrate at random intervals, whose mad foot-beat, over the course of…

In my mind the act of snorting is bestial. I become both man and medium, a thing drifting in through the window. A half moan leaves my throat. I hold on by the length of a boat, leaning against the dock. Everything in the world leans against a dock. My fingers, my wrist, the bee, the sun. There's not much to say except I've been a thesp of sorts, a smell of sorts. My monologue is smudged on the interior walls of a boy. Frank begs an aged-temple- of-swimming-niggas: ‘tell me about despair, about thievery, about the dancing horse and his men’. The haloed niggas float in silence, watching the boat. Frank, staring, perfect, is unwilling to say we're condemned to the world; or the world is condemned to us.…

The painting in Elizabeth Bishop's poem ‘Poem’ is set in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Bishop lived with her grandparents as a child. Her speaker imagines how her Uncle George, your great-uncle, must have left it in a trunk when he returned to England. It was then handed along collaterally to a series of relatives, who paid only the slightest attention to it, if any at all. Just the size of an old-style dollar bill, it never earned any money in any kind of currency. She mentions these hypotheses and elaborates on them as she wonders about her own past, the past that the painting presents. The place, initially unknown and unrecognized, is suddenly seen as known, recognized and identified. ‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘I know it.’ Then, wanting to bring it all back…

Disco Stu forks wet cat food into Tomato's crusted, stainless-steel saucer. Disco Stu is a friend of you, little kitty. Tomato hums in approval at his fingertips tiptoeing down her spine. Disco Stu sinks into a rhinestone-encrusted piano bench and shuffles through sheet music until arriving at Mamma Mia. Here Disco Stu goes again. Disco Stu updates his LinkedIn and scattershots his résumé to four dozen new positions using the filters Easy Apply, Past 24 Hours, & Remote Only. Disco Stu heaves a breath and phones Mother. You have to get your music out there, Sugar Plum. It's really very good. Disco Stu smiles, then frowns. Disco Stu doesn't advertise. Mother laughs. The stars shine like a flag in his little apartment window. When it's ice cream time, the disco ball comes…

Bury me in kyanite, a blue translucence, I want to read the earth. Beetle scratchings, hag stones, calligraphy of root systems all flash past. Here I am learning the buried tongue, the mineral subtext of things. Sewers drain into me – filter, amplify – till I am eye-to-eye with space-blue rock, fossilised screaming. Things are becoming abusive – petrifying. At these depths, I am a comet and he is the moon – astonishing and submerged. I gravitate to within his thrall – this orbit, a molestation and deep inside my blue cells I am buried and scratching alive. The elongated smallsword. The dense particle, rewritten. These bitter, untranslatable hours and even my body has become a wand of kyanite – absence of light yet somehow glittering – cerulean and pearlised…

I want to live a different way, although I don't know how. To start with something positive: today I want to live. A different way of putting it: I want, some part of me repeats. Call it the heart. It wants to live a different way, although I don't know how to start. It wants to live a different way, although I don't. Know how to start? Knowing's not enough. I say I want to live a different way, sounding resolute and smart, changing nothing. Playing a part. ‘I want to live a different way, although I don't know how to start.’…

with words this pain is good, you said. I put your plate over mine, lined with food stuff. I place my hand over my pen and wait for good letters written from the world inside yet to be opened. Outside, the weather isn't friendly, snow falling violent as the silent majority, as not-brown on silver fields of capital that daily unscaffold the heart. From the hospital bed last night you dreamed about your hospital. I poured water into paper cups for families seated in sterile corridors of Mercy for the expiation of ill-gotten money, senators willing to cease fire on children. True, my love, that poetry better than mine doesn't dampen with the mobility of beauty, the mutability of every day. I let go control and wait for my pen…

In the end, it felt nothing like the ends of anything. I went nearly to Virginia to learn to love you and now these hands are archives and I believe I am running out of water to share. I am a small ceramic dish with dessert upon me still. Try, first, eating dinner. While you're still here and quite hungry. I was entirely sure I would ask you this, but now we are counting cars in plastic chairs, joined by the flower pots we hung once, when we clapped our hands to rid them of dirt, when we thought we could repair the world only with very pretty things. We were mostly right; great things become faint slowly. Twilight gifts itself aimlessly, there for whoever knows it remains approaching. Oranges…

It is of course usual, and often planned and prepared for, that in the gift shops, everything that is sold is sold to individual tourists with individual national histories. It is of course remarkable, and often advertised, that each individual grain of star sand is different, so that each individual vial carries uniqueness to a near-infinite power. It is of course powerful, though less often remarked upon, that star sand is composed of the tiny bodies of sea creatures who have died individually in the same place over centuries. It is of course new, and often surprising, that in the twenty-first century, any littoral creature may be useful in tracking the impacts of climate stressors. It is of course accidental, and occasionally offset with carbon credits, that traveling to the…

I have turned over and felt the point of my hipbone through its cushioning. I have thought about a time I went to a restaurant bathroom in France and saw a scratched piano there on the landing by the stalls, how it sounded startled when I pressed its highest key. I have listened to my housemate clinking dishes in the kitchen and then heard the latch of the door. I have eaten a satsuma from a plastic bag. I have slept, and thought about the time I saw a meteor shower scud itself brokenly alight across the sky, and thought about the time I fell down in a forest and a tiny bit of bone came off inside my arm. I have slept again, and woken before my body did,…

Half-covered windows, sheets stripped from the bed and pinned with thumb tacks: This is just how it is here. My mother. It rains. Window: noun. A hole in the house that keeps letting all the bad shit in. See: the wasp in the kitchen. Window: noun. See: I yelled at my parents again. See: bunkered down together. Feet, hands, hair: a tangle in the bathtub. Things we don't know: where daughter ends and storm begins. Things we do know: the afterbirth of steam, worms on the sidewalk. It rains here. Things we don't know: the weight of all that water.…

We walk the flatlands and the peat's black-thousand-eye always shut in the daytime, down the ditch-dug road to the reservoir built sometime in the Second World War, its small boathouse lichen-blue and falling in at its windows. I watch you swim the silverweed, the white till of poplar seed thick enough to winnow each shadow. Once we drove the Orford Ness to a mire, three thousand years old, and found it like a mind undone and opening to gloam, still wet with another life. We left with the radio off, and I thought how I had never seen silence lie like that in day, never seen it coagulate. Light brackets the reservoir – and you all filament and filament of bone, your skin rising gold-green Os through the mudwater, igniting…

Love, build a nest for me in your iris. In your sigh, a trying Light. Help me see— not gods. Fireflies, planets, small heavens, your eyes. I tried my small hand at prayer. I prayed for small things, for feathers & fathers, A stillness that might call down heaven. Childhood. A trying time. Time, like a shock of water I haven't yet learned to swim. Azizam, rest Your feet in the stream. Your voice, making the cool current dear to me. Dear one, where can we build a home? Now that my life has passed, my hope Will outlive me. Rumi wrote us, across time. Write to me. Sing me your lasting hope. To live like a Huma bird, casting hope. To be Darius &— bound For. Like a shadow…

halfway through making him a snack grandma changed her mind and turned the knife on him, my dad, that small boy running down the garden path – no, probably there was no garden – boy running straight into the street, terraces crowded like bad teeth, drunks lying on the doorsteps, waiting for wives to take them in with the milk – or was it in Southend, they were always moving – small boy running past the crouched beach huts, the rotting nets, running on through the years into this day of her death, where he's beating the shit out of the hospital vending machine, trying to dislodge a Twix, to feed me, from its coil, unyielding. She's raising the knife in the dark 1970s kitchen, wallpaper fever-orange – no, 60s,…

The bedroom air becomes amniotic when you think of leaving again. This time: no party, no blue flag Xed onto the wall. Only the agitations of dust waiting lifetimes to settle in wet lungs. Hajrah called earlier. You both avoided the matter entirely – as if this isn't what you're known for. Leaving. The word wears itself. That arching throw of an eav into the familiar water of an ing. You live your life in ings. Breathing. Blinking. Moving but somehow lodged in their stillness. Ings. Pockets of persistence rattling at their doors. Tensions stopped short of release. There are ings hiding in plain sight, like the ing that goes before land in your birth country's name, which was never your father's and only partly your mother's. Or the ing that replaces…

AFUA ANSONG is the founder of the Adinkra Projects. As an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island, she leads workshops and lectures promoting cultural dialogue. afuansong.com DARIUS ATEFAT-PECKHAM is the author of Book of Kin, winner of the 2024 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and editor of his mother's posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us. His work appears in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He grew up in Huntington, West Virginia and is a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. CHAIM BEN AVRAM is a writer whose poetry appears in Denver Quarterly, RHINO, West Branch, and Tin House. A more extensive archive can be found at cbavram.com. AHANA BANERJI is a three-time Foyle Young Poet. In 2022,…

Meaning to write… A plaque that reads, come back later At the end of a garden corridor A set of scales that, when stood on, plummets into the minuses Wanting to be cognisant of what's occurring While surrendering to inputs The crenelated graphs of interest and exchange Read over somebody's shoulder… Could there be something hidden in a piece of paper? As if sewn into a pocket A possibility that adds no weight to it A leaf landing or a thumbprint Against the heaviness of what a necklace might have meant Just an image flaking off the morning As if it had no choice - Sourcing everything that way Come back later Waving a crutch in acknowledgement Deciding what to do with the rest of the day…

Your feet will be bare at the foot of a love that grounds you. Time, Like that bird that plucks your future from bowled hands. There is time - Not a consolation, but winging it quickly away from you, your fortune Held tight to its tongue like a hair for its nest, Time's song Disappearing into the white throat of the young of the mother- country. Another country. Unbound. Ungeographical. The cadence of Your hand fitting so perfectly to another's. I used to address the mirror, Counting, trembling, like the stuck minute hand of a clock, My gaze speeding down the drain as Bibi rinsed my face with rose water. I'd lie awake, absence draining through my chest, & give myself, time & again, to the dark. What is in…

The men I know are good men and sons. Weekly they attend to their reflections, unbuckling a belt, squeezing tender thighs past thick denim and feet from heavy leather. Wiping flecks of spent deodorant from their overgrown pits, these men proceed to pull their soft, wizened cocks out into the morning chill. This is not a rabbit-from-a-hat trick. By the time the bare, stringy balls come into view, they are shivering, concave and cold, sagging at breast, busted at knee, leaning slightly to one side, overlain by indents, disbursing half-articulate sounds. They are, I confess, ugly things. Behold the man, good and thoughtful men, chipped at the shoulder, surveying the bitter discontent of these hands of his, picking at a sallow cock that dribbles bile streaks down his ill-made leg.…

I really like things that straddle, Sam said. He was reading a book at the port, sat at the next table, waiting for his partner, and referring to writing that moves between poetry and prose, and I thought of the ferry that made its last trip of the day at around five from Athens to Aegina – how Paul and I, not wanting to be stranded on the mainland, ran for it. On Dino's balcony, overlooking the garden with its ancient trees, the pine processionary caterpillars straddled the threat of a defoliated pine – weeping its brown needles – and the threat of Dino's foot. He told me he doesn't like doing it, but he has a method of squashing, flinging, and mopping, which I've not seen, except in my…

Automatically breathing the cold September morning & bedroom-ambient air charged with the exchange of goods & services in time zones beyond the horizon's horizons & barcodes in the shelves stretching in the dawn prior to the cacophony half dreaming & half remembering a body committed to pedagogy the model being drawn, drawing us into gesture form his piercings & genitals his easy graces & kind manner the class being drilled on the proportions of the face broken down into four: chin to nose nose to brow brow to hair line hair line to top of the head (or peak of skull? what is the word?) somewhere among the morning birds & phones equal unitsI wanted to model myselfwhen I was on the dolebut the local art college never got back…

In particular a scene in the Dardennes’ L'Enfant where the child holds his own child – they are on the bus and we are on the bus beside them The baby burrows its face into the gap between the father's collarbone and shoulder A muted blue tint – as if the overcast sky were a color gel – drenches Wallonia out the window to their left: old factories hushed post-war and some minor hills too, beyond which the river Lesse goes underground, marking the end of arable land…

My hands are of two minds. My fist, an indelibly warped wingspan. I once was a boy short of breath bloodying knuckles with a dollar coin. The moon of my thumbnail was a conductor of electricity. My skin I bruise into. The years of my body are sunsets I'd rather sticky-note than reread. Some left bite marks, others a glimpse of that eyesore God has for a face. Picture for a forehead the bunching up of empty drop cloths. For a nose, the shattered clay mezuzah my zeyde hid in his unburnt bowels. For eyes, highlighters drying up. I carve out God's ears with all the lip service I pay the God of my Forefathers. God mouths into my ear the amount of back pay I'm owed. I settle for…

My lover and I are undocumented. We look each other in the eye and lie that this is the least of our problems. Over the phone we plan the number of children we will have. If she is born on American soil, we'll name her Asa. In Hebrew we are calling for divine intervention: in Akan we are calling for war. My lover speaks hope politely: Congress will pass an amnesty in our favour then I will take you home to meet my parents. He himself has not seen their wilted hands in a decade. Over the phone, we buy a three-bedroom house on Jersey street with statuettes we name Kofi Jeremy, Ama Josie, and Kwame James. We hire a live-in maid who is undocumented to take care of our…

The morning after it happens, your mother reschedules your death. Generous woman that she is, offering you second bones and new soil. The temperature yawning back into ligament, lung, the lowercase of stolen youth. The sun rises from its scissored sky. Birds open from the cage of your newly minted chest. There's a spotted brown deer leading you from the pavement to the meadow but that's the best part and the best parts always come later. For now, you're stuck with a new time of death, new ways of living outside yourself. I'm trying to find a kinder name for your mother, to forgive her for mapping you into this limbo, this dream and dance. The road now a chair, now half- eaten sushi on your desk. You reach for…