just what I've been through; it's nothing like what I'm going to -- The Violent Femmes

Emily must have sat here
looking at things
perhaps the same things
which now bite my legs
and then roar up
the non-road, the track thing
where I lost my phone
one day in the ferns
the same things, oh
all of it is about
a small girl trying

40,000 bodies in Haworth graveyard
it is almost impossible

Triumph Bonneville

oh, nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqwFR3dl5IE

.

stars, yes, but why?

I wish you lived next door. If you didn't like me I would leave you alone. Perhaps very occasionally I would take your bin around, but not so often that you would think I was attempting to make a point or inveigle you into my dreams of bins and neighbours and things. Sometimes, when the moon was high, we might meet outside in the cold with our bins, and regard each other. You would not trust me but we would chat a little and shuffle our feet, and I would go back, deflated, to my routines. One far off day, despite your reservations, you would invite me to a river, and I would say yes. Both of us would be nearly dead, and there would be a waterfall, and we would both wonder why

it took so fucking long.

.

15 million pirates suddenly confounded

some weather systems
I almost
then a small bird
perhaps lost
perhaps they have spare ones
but I
even through the glass

bang bang bang
they said, and I
not yet but trying
hard so hard I was trying
don't know who I was, though
maybe perhaps possibly
my tiny beak or analogue of my beak

aches and says
yes I would
if only my pecking
could be wider
wider if only
it was wider
and could

.

.

stifled dances of the dead people

all poetry ends in collapse
when the gimmicks are over

we only do this for so long
this equating, this anger, this conflation

which is what it is
stuck together by verve

now we must talk urgently
of dead submariners

their hoarding of breath
their trinkets, their stifled youth

I don't feel like a disease yet
I don't feel like a disease yet

a friend told me she was/is
a poor feminist as she was/is
too forgiving

I am not forgiving
not in that way
they put me in prison
for trying at 4am

not to be an illness

down there with not much left
I promise I have not even one
little song of you
just a choke and a feeling
of great and pressured darkness
inescapable dark
with such light
with goats dancing
on some silver ceiling

it is all about goats now, and what they do
it's not about peoples
not now

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The Triggerfish Critical Review No 19.

Latest TCR is out, guest-edited by Lynn Otto, who is one of our fellow 'advisory editors.' Well done to Lynn for an excellent job. 

THE TRIGGERFISH CRITICAL REVIEW

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