“You really should be thinking about getting your foot on the property ladder Heledd,” she stirs oat milk into her freshly made latte, “You are thirty soon.” The way her voice emphasises my age gets my back up and my jaw tightens on reflex.
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“I’m sorry, you want to do what?” My drink gets caught in my throat and some liquid shoots back into the glass. Covering my mouth with my hand, my eyes search my companion’s face for any signs of discomfort. Grant sits opposite me, his blonde hair teased to perfection, his eyes lingering on my chest. He gives me a lazy smile as he dips his fingers into his nearly empty drink and swirls the ice cubes round. My stomach heaves slightly.
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“I slug back the flute of champagne in my hand and look across the room. Everyone who is anyone in this company is here, the women in floor length dresses that catch the light and sparkle, and the men in freshly pressed tuxedos, their hair slicked back and shining”
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We are made from the stuff of stars, powered by electrical sparks fabricated in the only organ to have named itself.
Possibilities are endless
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A self-professed womanising drunk, Bukowski relied on a range of vices in order to fuel his creativity, “Drink, fuck, and smoke plenty of cigarettes.” His dark sense of humour lingers in his writing.
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There is sound everywhere you turn, a constant buzz that never ceases to quieten, even in the middle of the night. It swells and flows throughout the day, meandering through the throngs of people all in a rush to be some place else.
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There is something the poem can tell us about the body and something the body can tell us about the poem.
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This is part five of the Ataxia series. To read part four, click here
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I wrote ‘Owed Summer’ to remember what a Summer free of restrictions feels like, and how our generation is missing these shared experiences. It is also about how we grow, after living for so long without these experiences; touching friends, seeing live music, the pull of a communal pool of people.
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Opening up the first pages of The Bloody Chamber in my A-Level Literature class, I was not expecting to discover a lifelong love of Angela Carter, a writer who has had so much influence for me.
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To read the first part of this series, ‘A Question Of Now’, click here.
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They leant their bikes against the mouth of the cave, sheltering from the weather. The change from the breathing forest to the stagnant air in the cave was not particularly pungent but noticeable. From the mouth, the cave led off in a fairly straight direction and, in the dim light, the two women could just about see a smaller tunnel meandering off to the right.
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I am the self-consumer of my woes
They rise and vanish in oblivious host
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live, like vapours tossed
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Brenda O’Lox sighed: she was conscious she’d sighed live on air but was getting a little fed-up.
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The image of the Lady of Shalott sat in a boat, floating down the river to her death, famously captured the pre-Raphaelite imagination, successfully ticking all their boxes with Arthurian legend, the natural world and a mysterious, ethereal woman at the centre of the action. Personally, I adore ‘The Lady of Shalott’ for its fascinating, complex and multi-layered web of imagery and symbolism, that is just as bewitching today as it was to readers in the 1800s.
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This was my fourth year attending the Bristol Poetry Institute’s Annual Reading. Normally, we would be gathered in the great hall of the Wills Memorial Building and, upon arriving barely on time, I would be sat in a row towards the back of the hall, rummaging around my rucksack for my glasses. This year, I was sat at my desk staring at a Crowdcast on my laptop with Claudia Rankine on my screen.
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