Highly 3
Gareth Culshaw
A PLACE
I’ll find a place someday where stars
cover all the sky like a song sheet.
The time will tick until birds prise
open the horizon, allowing sunlight to ignite.
My shadow, a shoe-insole of my body,
as I wander, where next to tread.
The thoughts I’ve turned into facts
may weep through the eye’s skylight.
The years lived taken away by
the rising of another day as if God
is pulling me back out of the grave.
I’ll find a place to shape myself
renew the days I’ve lost watching
swallows, or thought I heard Mother
in a blackbird, singing from a rooftop.
Highly 2
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
My daughter has made a devi
and named her Protector of Nature.
She is muscular in an orange jumpsuit
with violet skin, five pair of eyes
to watch everything, one massive arm,
two mouths set in stern lines. I wonder
what she might say to us as she surveys
climate change, habitat loss, extinction –
but her lips stay closed, her lotus crown
unshaken. My daughter tells me:
She makes plants grow and clouds move.
Imagine her broad legs stamping
over ravaged ground, eradicating taint,
summoning tendrils, fugitive roots:
see her huge fist raised to the skies
commanding cumulus to swell
to thunderheads, their purple tears
bruising her face, blinding her eyes,
scattering petals over the earth.
Highly 1
Sam Szanto
The Chat
Suzie: Olive’s not my friend (angry emoji)
Olive: Suzie’s my enemy (slapping emoji)
Rasheed: Girls are idiots (eye-roll emoji)
Suzie has left the group
The PCSO stares at the half-bored,
half-expectant faces of the Year Sixes,
their laughter trapped inside them
like coke in shaken bottles.
‘What do you children know
about social media?’ asks the PCSO.
A girl’s hand is a desperate sunflower.
She says, ‘My mum’s an influencer.’
‘No she’s not,’ says another,
‘she has, like, a thousand followers.
My sister’s got four thousand
on YouTube and loads on TikTok.’
In her pocket, the PCSO’s phone buzzes.
She wonders if it’s her daughter,
who has recently unblocked her –
or the plumber she called earlier.
The PCSO tells the children
not to say things online
that they wouldn’t in real life and
not to allow strangers into a chat.
She feels her phone buzz again.
It could be the gratitude app,
a swipe right on the dating site
or the mums’ night out group.
Rasheed: Harry can’t play Fortnite (grinning emoji)
Harry: Rasheed can’t play dodgeball (falling emoji)
Priti: Suzie fancies Marco (kissing emoji)
+99 77999 00011 has joined the chat.
Humour
Jane Burn
Beryl the Rogue Librarian
Has mixed up the labels on the bags of herbal tea. On purpose.
When Brian thought he had taken a swig of Chamomile, it turned out
to be Peppermint, so he spat it all over the Large Print aisle
like piquant rain. It’s good to spice things up, Beryl frequently quips.
At break time, she sometimes puts one chocolate digestive on the plate
of shortbread so nobody knows which biscuit to logically eat.
Of course, everyone wants the chocolate digestive, but politeness
leaves their fingers hovering. Oh no, you take it. I insist. Oh,
I couldn’t possibly. Beryl smiles, reaches for the treat, then bites
into its tasty wheel. She like to cause a mild scandal, now and then –
sometimes, she leaves a gaudy magazine on the front desk, open
at the quiz page and deliberately writes the most curious answers.
Once, she stuck a picture of a fried egg over her own photo ID,
just to see if anyone would notice. Don’t worry, Beryl told them
when they did. I’m sunny side up. She slips the occasional Beatrix Potter
among the rustle of Periodicals because grown-ups need reminding
that they were young, once – that they used to believe in rabbits
who wore blue coats. When it’s her turn to dust Reference,
Beryl leaves gifts between the pages of the weighty tomes –
pressed flowers, cross-stitched mottoes (Today is the first day
of the rest of your life, A stitch in time leaves the hours a little tighter
for tomorrow), hand-drawn maps to imaginary places, recipes
for bread, advertisements for coach trips to Pickering, wrappers
from scented soap that still smell of flowers. Beryl’s true love
is the Children’s Section. She tries to make it as appetising as she can –
splays tempting fans of bright covers, serves vivid rows of spines.
Beryl is always trying to make their world a rainbow.
When everything went online, she kept one box of old index cards
discreetly under the staffroom sink and thumbs the frayed edges
so she won’t forget. On crumpet Tuesdays she waits for the oozing,
piled-up plate to be put on the table before announcing that crumpets
are just nature’s way of delivering butter into your face. This way, the others
will feel too guilty to take more than one while she gets to gobble
down three. They are discussing the latest letter – necessary closures
are thewords that leap from the efficient sheet. Austerity
is shutting the door on their world. Her hand tightens
on the toasting fork. Aye, she thinks. Just let them come and try.
3
Jim C Wilson
Marthe de Méligny
Bonnard built her a beautiful bathroom:
tiled walls, blue checkered floor, and the latest
in free-standing tubs. And she, a Paris waif,
who’d sewn fake pearls on funeral wreaths,
could wash and wash and lie and soak, immersed
to her soul’s content – and be the Nude in the Bath,
while he’d watch her and see the wavering shades
of azure, fuchsia and aquamarine;
watch her, understand and memorise,
as the mistral moved through the orange groves
and pines, the sun sank into the Bay of Cannes.
And Bonnard walked through to the studio,
to his canvas securely tacked to the wall
where Marthe, immobile, slowly evolved,
legs crossed, still bathing, as ever. The water
is cool now, and has changed to a colour
of memory. And she is resplendent,
a kind of still life, both corpse-like and alive.
Fill the tub, fill the tub again, my love.
2
Julie Burke
The Matriarchy
She’s from a long line of widow-women,
washer-women, seamstresses, usherettes,
who boiled and hung out their Monday linen,
front steps gleamed as bright as their cigarette
tips. Pinafored, a stout band of mothers
nursed colicky infants as best as they could
alongside silent, war-broken brothers.
God alone knows how so many withstood
the hardship, loss – the sheer graft of living…
they simply rolled up their sleeves and set to,
kissed it better with a smear of butter.
When life gave them lemons, as life will do,
they made lemon cheese, curd or marmalade.
Nothing as frivolous as lemonade.
1
Jane Burn
I am Soil
I am farmed dry. The crop sprayer brings me the saddest rain –
a hopper follows the furrows, and I am seeded yet again.
If only I could wake to wildflowers.
When will it be my fallow year?
The crop ripens above me, and nobody believes
that I am slowly dying beneath. I am plough, hunk and marl –
do you remember when the stubble used to burn?
When my skin became acres of flame,
when the sky was dusked with smoke?
How the hares and mice had to flee from the dwellings
they had scraped into my skin?
I am leaf-mould; loam and deep-mulch layer.
I am your most beloved plot, your halcyon Sundays spent
in trowelling roots, in spires of ornamental grass, in beds of roses.
Surprising how much better you feel when I am worked
beneath your nails.
You begin to understand my mysteries of growth –
the tender journeys from sprout to bloom;
how it drains my strength.
You lift my harvest to your mouth
and hope to taste miracles. I am silt and sand; the lime bitterness
of chalk; the salt under lilac, lavender and yew.
I am waterscarce, waterlogged; I am the history of peat,
its matter and moss, its suck and sinking mire –
I hold your ancient dead, stain them with my bog-strange milk –
keep the secrets of each of their wounds, each withy hoop,
each knuckle, wrinkle, thread of hair. Keep them as if
they are sleeping, save them with sphagnan,
lip them with my muskeg kiss.
I am clay, and you have quarried me out. I have raised your homes;
I am the tiles between your heads and rain.
I am your factories bricked up red against the sky,
the doom that you shaped from my anthracite threads.
I am all the journeys you have made – I carry your machines,
your stone, slate, coal, wheat, goods and iron. Your feet,
your wheels, your endless asphalt miles.