AUB International Poetry Prize 2023 — Digital Anthology

AUB

International Poetry Prize

digital anthology

2023

edited by

Dr Natalie Scott

First published in 2024

By Arts University Bournemouth All rights reserved © Arts University Bournemouth 2024 The right of the poets published in this anthology to be identified as the authors of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to the publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Cover design by AUBCW

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aub international poetry prize Digital anthology

2023

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contents Foreword…5 Comments from the Judges…6 First Prize a dog’s chance (why I called) - Natalie Perman…8 Runner Up If - Naoise Gale…9 Runner Up Purple Iris - Ken Evans…10 Highly Commended A Mist of Smoke - Claire Lynn…11 Fruit Machine - Jonathan Edwards…12 Incry - Andrew George…13 Marginal - Sharon Black…14 No Chance - Elisabeth Murawski…15 Odds Against - Adrian Buckner…16 Only The Grey Ones Can Kill You - Helen Angell…17 RITN IN Đ STARZ - Frank Johnson…18 Sacha’s Menshi on the Lavvie Wall - Karen Downs-Barton…19 Voting Day - Norman Miller…20 Longlisted Amateur Observations - Libby Jeffrey…21 Bidding Goodbye to the Ghosts of Our Alternate Histories - Jonathan Greenhause…22 Chance - Josh Lefkowitz…23 Chance - Mara Adamitz Scrupe…24 Chance Encounter - Penny Shutt…25 Delicacy - Paul Monaghan…26 E. Jean Carroll’s Chance Encounter with Donald Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman Department Store - Eve Young…27 Empty Bag - Bradley Samore…28 Fictional Intersection - Wendy Allen…29 Forward March - Bradley Samore…30 Gallant - Elisabeth Murawski…31 He's gone - Chrissie Dreier…32 How I Met Sandy - Shoshanna Rockman…33 In Bocca al Lupo - Karen Downs-Barton…34 Infinity, & Zero - Jonathan Greenhause…35 Inheritance - Gemma Barnett…36 Jumping Into The Blended Aisle - Genevieve Flintham…37 3

Many a Slip - Dominic James…38 Meeting in Bloomsbury - Judith Wozniak…39 Miracle of Existence - Hollie Garraway…40 My daughter found this emerald on the beach - Olivia Walwyn…41 My Grandfather Delivering Fruit Machines, 1975 - Jonathan Edwards…42 On Not Becoming Curator of Keats-Shelley House - Isabella Mead…43 Rebirth - Sheila Aldous…45 Rock, Paper - Norman Miller…46 Russet - Shoshanna Rockman…47 Seagulls - Steven Duggan…48 Suicide: Chasms or Mountains? - Nova Molteno…49 The Soap-Dishes in the Shower Block at Alcatraz - Isabella Mead…50 Tidings - Nikheel Gorolay…51 To Become a Famous Rooster, You Must First Ship Sand - Genevieve Flintham…52 Today the sky is full of threads - Alice White…53 Twenty-two - Mary Mulholland…54 Whale Song - Gloria Sanders…55 AUB Student Showcase Bon Apaga…56 garbage hill Juno-Blake Cree…58 Fish Save Me Isabelle Fairhurst…60 Lemon Kester Grieve…61 Allure in Black Angels Wear Armour Cameron House…63 Door and Boxes Evie Molyneux…64 The Abandoned Patch Karishma Natu…65 Candlelit Molly Ward…66 tree surgeon Ben Whittall…67 dear fellow homosexual, Carmilla Williamson…68 The Endless Promise Hailey Wood…69 Swimmer’s Gospel Acknowledgements…70

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foreword The AUB International Poetry Prize was established by BA Hons Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth and is in its third year running now. We’re proud to say we still have a wide international reach with our entries; this year we received hundreds of poems from more countries than ever, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Jamaica, Zambia, USA, Australia, Canada, Ukraine, Germany, Bulgaria, Netherlands, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.

The theme was Chance, and poets responded to it using many interesting shapes and forms. Voices ranged from the personal to the universal, some being highly symbolic in their use of language to present chance, and others quietly and beautifully capturing chance in a specific moment remembered. We had chance being given, taken, bravely, fearfully, from brief romantic encounters to memories of fruit machines. And everything in between.

The brilliant Emily Dickinson said that ‘Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned.’ And it’s clear to see the hard labour that has gone into crafting the poems which made the longlist. The standard was exceptionally high and the judging process tough, though perhaps it could be described as an enjoyable toil.

We are also proud to represent a selection of our current BA Hons Creative Writing students and alumni in this anthology. This work is wide-ranging and challenging in its approach to subject-matter and form, with no topic deemed to be out of bounds.

Some of our students are celebrating successes in the poetry world beyond that of their studies and we congratulate them on this impressive feat.

Vicky Arthurs describes poetry as “the Belgian chocolates of the bookshelf. You can pick one and linger over it. Savour the aroma, the taste, the melting texture, the sweet craving it leaves behind! Or you can scoff down as many as you can eat. It’s up to you.”

So, I invite you to relish this selection of poetry in whatever way you choose; I guarantee it will leave a lasting taste on the mind.

Dr Natalie Scott Editor (2023) & Founder of the AUB International Poetry Prize Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth

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comments from the judges judging panel It was a pleasure to be involved in judging this year’s Poetry Prize entries. Well done to all the entrants and it was fantastic to see so many poems that displayed such strong command of poetic form and phonology. Flair, originality of image and emotional heft were other characteristics found to varying degrees across stronger entries here. Perhaps most impressive was the range of ingenious and by-no-means random ways in which poets interpreted the theme of “chance”! To all poets, keep writing! Keep dazzling us with your ideas, language and craft.

chair of judges - glyn maxwell Another fine longlist, and wonderful shortlist, brings to light several rich and unforgettable poems, and these three take the prime positions…

The first-prize winner is the brilliant a dog’s chance (why I called). In this poem one can see the harnessing of a powerful and under-used force in poetry: sheer gravity.

Gravity of subject matter, here’s the loss of a beloved, but I mean specifically downward force, the inescapable pull of word and light and mood southwards. This is seeded in the downbeat tone of the title, along with the word why, ringing its own alarm-bell, but it never lets up, whether it’s the tolling of the negative – nothing, Not, Not, Not even – the agglomeration of unrelenting weight in the poem – building works, bricks, drains, rubber, swamped, pennies, leaden – or the brief couplets themselves, like weak rungs of a ladder, not holding but failing. That nothing shakes the speaker’s sense of survival should be a positive in theory, but it doesn’t feel like that, and it takes the slightest clownish nudge, the couple in matching scarves/sticking their tongues out, to bring down the house of cards. The last line and a half are a familiar but agonizing capitulation: the admission that can do no good, the suggestion that won’t either, and both croaked from the foot of a mineshaft, as the visual depth of this poem so deftly depicts.

Second prize goes to if, a passionate and enthralling rant of regret. Love’s lost once again, though more ambivalently mourned here (is it death or just heartbreak?) a wallowing in compensatory sensual language, giving heavenly (i still want us to fly away together) and purgatorial (at the clinic…i should hate you) glimpses alike. Like any hurt psychology trapped in a loop, it has its own catchphrase, if i’d known, if i’d known, i wish i’d known, with the I decapitated to lower-case i, as if in bed or denial or self-abnegation. This lyric flight is what it does instead of sex, no let-up, no pause, thought is most unwelcome here. The mind is giddy, the tone intense, the changes reckless, as if it’s storming back into the past to show what the lost one could have had. But the left-behind one has nothing but spirits to address, and daydreams of the 6

too-late. A fine hymn to extreme and sensuous irritability, loneliness on fire, the skin sent crazy for the loss of touch and dream of shared life.

The third prize-winner is a spiral lament. Purple Iris finds a mother imagining the unlived life of her infant lost at birth. Its spiral is the moving path it treads around this awful fact, avoided to the end, as the mother conjures heart-warming mundane details of any child’s possible future. What’s beautiful about these is their in-joke quality, they have the intricate and intimate detail of a life there really was. Here gravity is at its fearsome work in a different form, the tower of poignant make-believe rising while slowly revealing itself to be illusion, shadow, this shadow unstoppably turning real, turning to the shaded glass window of a never-to-be-forgotten chapel of rest. Patterned with sorrow and the lights of consolation, the poem is skilful, soulful, believable, brave.

Glyn Maxwell, September 2023

Glyn Maxwell's books of poetry include How The Hell Are You, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020, Pluto, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2013, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2004. His book-length poem Time’s Fool is in development as a feature film with Fox Searchlight. In 2012 he published On Poetry, a popular critical guidebook, and in 2016 its fictional sequel, Drinks With Dead Poets.

His plays include Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008, and The Lifeblood, which was British Theatre’s ‘Best New Play’ at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004. He is also a librettist and novelist. During a ten-year spell in the USA he taught at Amherst, Princeton, Columbia and NYU, and in the UK has taught at the Universities of Warwick, Essex and Goldsmiths, and currently teaches on the MA at the Poetry School. He was Chair of Judges for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2022.

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first prize a dog’s chance (why I called) Natalie Perman In that season of car alarms caterwauling on doorsteps nothing shook my sense of survival. Not building works or loose bricks or leaves choking the drains. I rushed through it in the spark of an electric current through a rubber glove.

Not black mould or bills excluded or socks with holes could rattle me — the wailing fretless chorus played as I swamped the wide expanse of day, felt its geography loose in my pocket like pennies in a coin purse.

Not even when you sent flowers for my birthday did I let up. And yet when I saw that couple in matching scarves sticking their tongues out, drinking warm beer, I took love’s leaden buoy and swung on it. It ended: I miss you, talk to me.

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runner up If i’d known it was the last time, i’d have taken all of you, lounged with you one lazy afternoon for a final shudder, my body buttercream on the sponge mattress - if i’d known it was the last time i wouldn’t have fought. slowing. my breath whistling like a pan of raspberries. heat snaking through the windows, crisping edges. if i’d known it was the last time i could have saved the bin, months later, chewing hard on a memory of you. blaming my mother for lack. health indulgent. green limbs and baby hair in the garden. if i’d known i could have done you better, a professional fucker-fuckee arrangement leading to a glittering solo aftermath. i would have sucked you, with hindsight. let you pillage me for a nap. curtains closed. no assignment. no letters scrambled like scrabble when eyes yielded to pleasure. no plotline so urgent. but then it was tomorrow and we were at the clinic. i should hate you. solid days i muster ambivalence - when it clouds, there’s yearning. i should hate you because in your orange i was chrysalis, husk holding wings, but i still want us to fly away together on a magic flapping towards an island gifted warm pink water, spilt tea sky, enough diamonds to validate our choices. bianca says play the tape forward and i’m snapped pupa in the garden, snarled in spit. butterflies are just impulses painted pretty. but i need someone to show me how else to believe in beauty. if i’d known it was the last time – and spirits, i wish i’d known it was the last time – i’d have held you like a heart attack. kissed all the blue from my lips. shut everything and sunk into you, into earth wetter than my using dreams. brushed grass. mud cake. velvet. drifting on heat, bouncing off every wall of the bus. skull slung like a sacrifice.

Naoise Gale

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runner up Purple Iris Ken Evans I think you would have been clever on date apps, knowing the interaction is flammable, you'd squeeze one before trying, like a satsuma.

I think you would be tall and long-limbed, like your swimming brothers who followed, a bit sporty and awkward maybe, in your teens.

I think, at twenty-four next birthday – what a time for you - you’d be doing OK in an alright job, and as all us ingrates, moan about public transport, make plans for a ridiculous future. I think, on waking, you'd find me guilty-as-charged downstairs, and we’d share the one light from a fridge-door over milk and cereal, and I will try and pull you close, ask where you’ve been all these nights, scaring us: about as useful as asking why light shines on one bit of pavement every morning at 11 o’clock and why not on the purple iris to the side who stays courteous but unhappy in the shade.

Angles and refraction and accident and physics explains life even as it swallows it whole.

All I know is no-one ever fell out of a tree without killing themselves or breaking something. It’s enough, except reality goes on and on and the fall from the high bough snags leaves and twigs and upturned birds’ nest in my hair, as well as blue pockets of sky to help with what’s lost and lend an illusion of recovery.

I know for all this, thought’s a realm of stone, a cairn I add to every year, building a taller tower to see, while shadow grows up on a small window of shaded glass, the chapel of rest where I held you ten minutes without the midwife, putting off letting you go.

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highly commended A Mist of Smoke Claire Lynn A child’s gloved hand in each of mine, I snatched a chance and led off into the night, not pausing to look for stars. The trees held out their arms in welcome or startled by our passing and we could hear river ice cracking through the still cold air behind us dawn blooded the horizon in a mist of smoke the children stumbled and dragged but through the wool of my hat I couldn’t hear them whine heaving them onwards over the iron ground and when the earth shook beneath my feet wasn’t that the train rattling by hundreds of yards away the length and weight of it? I pushed onwards and arriving here laid side by side on the fireguard two unmatched gloves

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highly commended Fruit Machine Jonathan Edwards Me? I’m here all day. My thoughts are thoughts that cycle in a loop through cherries, bells then strawberries. Ding ding! I go. Ding ding! like this, and all you suckers here in front of me, I see myself reflected in your wide, wide pupils, and I know exactly what you want. This button’s sitting here, between your present and your past and look, the noise I make the song I sing is baby I’m the gap between the pittance that you’ve got and everything.

You reach a gleaming coin towards this glinting slot, and what’s this but the price you pay for hope? There’s some of you, I long to say so much, you stand in front of me and riffle through your pockets, purse, your hands, they shake, they shake, but me, I only speak in symbols, code, in berries. Don’t you know that I was made to take it all from you? And now another trip for change, another coin and here’s the flashing multicoloured moment when me and you have stepped out on the edge, my love, to hold our breath here in the silence between silence and Christ I’ve won. One cherry. Two. I know what word comes next. It’s here, on the tip of my tongue.

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highly commended Incry Andrew George What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Your outraged face appalled at my five tiles.

The telly’s looping pictures from Ukraine.

The board is quaking quietly at your bile.

What the hell is ‘incry’?

It’s ‘in-cry’ I counter, but although I truly feel I’m right I know I cannot tell you why I ever thought the wretched word was real.

Already you’re a-google and attacking.

A gallic heavy-metal group. Disbanded.

A proper noun, to boot. Now you’re re-racking my rejected letters whilst, one-handed, furiously crossing out my score.

I’m hopeless but I’ve nothing left to lose.

It’s the opposite of outcry.

Sure.

Now show me the dictionary you’ll use.

Noun I shout whilst leafing through the rules A universally held but unvoiced sense of anger, turmoil, fear or disapproval.

But I can only find those riffing French.

Does not exist in English! No such word!

The television switches scene to Yemen.

You start to place your letters on the board and, with disdain, I watch you use all seven.

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highly commended Marginal Sharon Black The border is a twelve-foot wall; a roll of barbed wire, guard dogs drooling on the other side.

It’s a river thick with crocodiles.

The border is a picket fence around a clean suburban garden, is a contract, a marriage, a lesson in forgiveness.

The border is a state of mind, a word your father said.

Guards patrol in pairs, or singly at night with torch-light and a half-drunk bottle in their hand.

They stand in uniform, or sit back in an ancient metal chair, cigarette tips glowing.

They look like the kid who picked on you at school, like the cousin, killed outright, who slipped, laughing, from the bumper of a speeding truck.

Their rifles linger, gleaming, at their sides like the river near your childhood home no-one knew about but you, where that summer you built a lookout den with stolen planks, wired a trap that snared a rabbit, cooked it on a campfire, knew you could survive anything.

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highly commended No Chance Elisabeth Murawski Pardon my Cinderella exit.

You seemed so interested in what I had to say, my life before today, I didn’t have the heart to interrupt, reveal my plan for a fairy tale getaway. I must confess as I drove off I wasn’t thinking of you lonely at the party, puzzled as the prince holding a shoe.

I was dancing in my head with a most unavailable man, remembering the place on my hand where he briefly and tenderly kissed me.

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highly commended Odds Against Adrian Buckner In the café on the fifth afternoon of the heatwave, I give a little thought to each of the three husbands who have left me.

They cling in the fetid hour of four and I cannot for the few-minutes life of me divide them in the fug of my mind.

One berated me in public, the other came within an inch of striking me and then did.

The last refused all treatment and made a noisy virtue of it.

All I know is that one then the other prepared me as sucker to the next and last.

I look up to see a man at the counter – I hear him ask May I Have? rather than Can I get? and by the girl’s soft smile I know he has provoked a convivial exchange to lift a little the dust of afternoon.

When he sits down he does not eye me but regards the space that includes me with an amiability that ravishes me with sadness – pondering as he opens, not a laptop but a book, what kind of miseries his type keeps in store for the likes of me.

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highly commended Only The Grey Ones Can Kill You Helen Angell for Katia and Maurice Krafft

We spent our lives jumping at the seismograph’s needle, circling craters hurling their red plasma.

I always preferred you walking ahead of me, hated you wandering out of sight into the snake spit and lick of lava.

We faced the plume together, refused to close our eyes even as the grit burnt our faces, filled our nostrils and mouths.

Only your watch and my camera survive side by side in the volcanic ash. For once, we are contained and quiet, two square urns adjacent in the Japanese temple.

When you need us, we will guide you, waterproofed guardians in red and yellow, to safety in the Philippino hills.

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highly commended RITN IN Đ STARZ Frank Johnson How life works out Dpndz on nećr, nrćr and srcmstans But always with a healthy dose of you And ćans. In fact The chances of our being here At ol Are incredibly Smōl.

So ɖer’z a ćans, How ever small, Đis mît hav lŭct lîc ɖis And not like this at all.

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highly commended Sacha’s Menshi on the Lavvie Wall Karen Downs-Barton Honey, I’m still free, Take a chance on me.

ABBA

In this clatty yard I’m a connel of light breeze-stroked leg tops an’ struttin’ ma stuff.

Ru Paul, honey, you can eat your bulgy heart out these balls are tight-gaffed in a lycra leotard.

Fuck knows what I’ll do when it’s jimmy time but I’m haudin’ an’ shimmyin’ bits of finery and tat.

See me, riding shotgun with my bonnie Barbies, token faux-femme, just ginj-to-ma-minje, an’ crackin’ a funny. And in this Kandy Box of dance floor guys the dabblers and bibi’s, the sidle-up-behind-ya’s with a glass half empty… No chance baby!

This dancing queen’s only taking a punt on a future with a leather bear, flat wi’ a garden and a bairn of our own.

Do you wanna be my teddy bare?

͌

Menshi graffiti, connel candle, clatty manky, jimmy (riddle) piddle, haudin’ holding my/your own, gaffs elasticated cloths, etc. that hide/constrict male genitals, Romani glyph, meaning mistress wants a child.

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highly commended Voting Day Norman Miller the idiot syncro Cs of C2s: Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, Maybe Piltdown Man. Oh man, desperately seeking the X to mark the spot, the moment when pencil kisses paper and everyone hopes life will go OK so long as Typhoo puts the t in Britain, and a cunt remains in Scunthorpe.

Studying PM shadow on his jaw a map (unelectoral) reflects in a mirror behind the 50something head of Mr Ogynist, business owner (failing) mulling on the bullet points of ballots A ballet his first time voting daughter jigs, new christened 'Stevenage Woman' by pollsters seeking poll stars, prophesies for which box she will choose to lie before, like Houdini, escaping into the townscape of her swing seat, dreaming how one day it might house her home.

She straps in, buckles her future in the back, then punches a route into GPS, detouring to find a way to poll station, then pole dance.

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longlisted Amateur Observations Libby Jeffrey I Having first observed a looming deadline, she set out to observe the earth itself. The Red River was west, scrolling north, dappled by surviving ice blocks. She squints to the east noting sidewalk, wooden post fence, cratered road, sidewalk, soggy skating rink. She smirks from her urban bench-perch, playing the poet, the bard, the careful observer.

II Her ears perk up. A mysterious ‘weep weep’ from the treetop is set to a drummer’s one, two, three and four and --- A pair of mallards fly low, their voices a proclamation sent south. Her hand races, suddenly this is the loudest din she has ever heard. Sight takes over when he scuttles onto the scene. Tactical, he strides across the dry, tufted grass then jolts his beak down to grasp an ant. She squints against the sun, her breath shallow. Pen furious, She cocks her head to the right, devouring his perfect as a prefect posture, the half moon on his chest, a yellow hue, a red spot. Her hand jitters. Mouth curls up like the leaves in which he is rummaging. Northern Flicker?

What a find. Noted.

III Geese in diagonal rush overhead. Her pen slows to a halt.

Eyes up. Jaw slack. Mind races to count. “Woah!” she hears her own voice, a windstorm of awe.

Four geese break off to collapse into a V. Seeing now, seeing with her whole body, she folds into a new formation. Her hand slows, catches pace with the flicker’s dipping beak. Slow, slow fast-fast-fast. Her pen dips and flutters across the page. The rest of her an urban iceberg, melting into spring.

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longlisted Bidding Goodbye to the Ghosts of Our Alternate Histories Jonathan Greenhause My nervous first valentine – from when we were nine – transforms herself into an outline erased from a dust-spackled chalkboard, her expectant grandmother one of dozens of immigrants leaping from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory’s heights in March 1911, her singed fingertips never grasping the sweaty hand of my valentine’s mother; & the truest love I discovered at the saucer-&-cup boisterous back of a darkened café dissipates like London fog when the gentleman who fathered her is lynched in Money, Mississippi, on a routine evening in the 1950s; though I still sense her lips’ electricity connecting with a jolt to my own as I excitedly wipe away a double-latte’s foam. My best friend becomes an elaborate parlor trick, a fleeting illusion undone when his adolescent mother is shot twice in the back during the Newark riots of ’68, her full-throated gospel lowered to a death-rattling whisper, a purgatorial pause, our haunting causes & effects individually crossing us off, our historical certainty – now a bible of stolen geneses.

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longlisted Chance Josh Lefkowitz And if you had been too tired that night or decided to stay home and study instead?

If I’d had three less therapy sessions, those last wounds not yet cauterized?

The bus accident from Saturday evening opted to occur on our Tuesday?

The one right before me, for you, had been a hair taller, a dimple more charming?

Our prayers were received by a substitute God who mispronounced the names?

Younger, backpacking through Europe, you’d sighed I wish I could live here—then made it come true?

My parents settled on two, not three, adding a dog instead of a me?

Ten hundred thousand variables.

I clutch you closer in the dark.

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longlisted Chance Mara Adamitz Scrupe what comes of a woman at a certain age / balm to the new stocked pond – nasty with catfishing love for money/ boulders rising sentinel-like/ erect at the rim – throw food to the hoop in the water they’ll fly up ugly & catch it midair – that was an entirely other life where prayers meant some vertiginous moment Aristotle called it hamartia or missing the mark meanwhile the bees are out bothering the butterfly weed gently & rough & eager to please as sex & solitude & a skilled Casanova in his impotent sixties/ all the resistances in the world won’t change that still/ always move/ never stop. stop count this day -to-day as unremarkable as five-hundred miles straight north the slots chime pull up a chair play some Blackjack & raise the stakes against all comers/ Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe owns it runs it still here. here never left balm. balm the crapshoot the gambler’s conceit/ the risky behavior of the winner the two-deck four-deck/ six-deck shoes likewise a gambler's fallacy in the losing streak/ roulette by chance we all got to grow up in balm. balm in the urgency of a boreal summer day/ long where the lakes stay cold granite bottomed/ balm. balm/ in the hounded weight of a deep winter day glacial. flow cold.cold the way an early riser wakes/ dresses in darkness’s blossoming balm. balm to the heel of snow shadow sometimes just to feel the feel of body that bear’s shaky limp head wagging I could’ve stopped & waited in the road for this black angel of the living to catch up but he heard it before I did that Galaxie 500’s roaring/ blowing exhaust

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longlisted Chance Encounter Penny Shutt Perhaps there was something maternal in me even back then, that made me stray from the platform of my daily commute to follow the paws of that black puppy as it traipsed behind the brick wall of the station waiting room and there, surrounded by the usual array of sleeping bags, rizlas and guitars was my brother, the dog in his red bandana, and the mother of my eventual child. She grinned at me, way out of his league with her peachy skin and purple braided hair. I remember my compulsion to pay their fare – how I stared at the guard, daring him to challenge the valid tickets I provided to their destination. The puppy curled into Porro’s hip and slept as the train shuddered off. I asked them where they’d come from, where they were going and where they were planning to sleep when they got there.

And I remember even then, it was me who gathered that collarless scrap of fur from the carriage, fearful of the gap between the train and the platform’s edge that neither of them seemed to see.

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longlisted Delicacy Paul Monaghan The present is like a work of science fiction uncertain of its utopian credentials, with innovation a swaggering superhero whose very mention of rescue spells danger.

Still, I'd rather test the possibilities than leave change's chattels in unopened boxes, while some fragile chance has hope declare —not Do not handle—Handle with care.

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longlisted E. Jean Carroll’s Chance Encounter with Donald Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman Department Store didn’t stop him from becoming the 45th President of the United States from 2017 to 2021 or a billionaire and you’re neither of those things but if I can I will stop you from ever becoming either, because I don’t want to stay quiet anymore.

I look forward to translating the new language you taught me—lines connected to their sound, and I talk too.

Eve Young

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longlisted Empty Bag Bradley Samore The summer’s been keeping it one-hundred, but I’ve been just thirty-one this week, angsty at others instead of looking at myself, so I drive to the park as if the lake’s a better mirror than the one in my bathroom.

I walk to the Japanese garden, questing for peace and consider the colonial nature of that statement.

The path is nocked with arrows: one way during Covid for us to stop turning on each other. Ahead — a mother and father out with their son; two women in person for the first time in months; twentysomethings on a double date; and me, assuming the position of an omniscient narrator. The artificial waterfall exhales interminably. And Me! Me! a peacock calls, raising his eyes to gawk at a peahen grazing. Someone brandishing a selfie-stick tiptoes to get as much plumage in the frame as possible, and when the hen and peacock run away, rage swells in my throat but I swallow it, discerning my yelling more likely disturbing than paparazzi.

Unable to stand myself or other people, I find a bench and relinquish my thoughts for the lake.

A green heron glides above its reflection and lands on a rock, stabs the water, and retracts its neck to gulp.

There is not the fleece of a single cloud.

A woman in flip-flops saunters into view with three kids galloping behind, ponytails fountaining from the tops of their heads, and as she looks at the sky, I can see the tattoo on the side of her neck glistening over the ridge of her jaw and onto the buoyant meadow of her cheek.

The kids giggle and crumble bread for a growing crowd of geese, and I rise to tell them bread isn’t good for the birds but notice one of the geese is missing a foot, just standing on the shore, watching as the others eat. It paddles the air, trying to put down what isn’t there. I get goosebumps, the recognition of being left behind, the others moving on without even looking back. It hops a foot closer, turning to me as if to say, “Please, do you have any?” and I show my hands, my furrowed brow that feeds no one. We look at the flock, the kids reaching into the bag for the last slice, and I almost shout. But what would I say?

There is no more bread.

— June 24, 2020 28

longlisted Fictional Intersection Wendy Allen The clock on the wall has stopped at one forty-one though the second hand continues to beat. Digital time moves forward, heartless. In the exam hall I clock watch for the point where the two intersect. In time travel you will recognise me as your daughter.

Seconds pass around in circular like the absence within the Hilma af Klint I liked at The Tate, yellow, forget me not. I think of the last time you ever looked at your watch and knew time, recognised the round face of numbers. We stopped fastening the watch to your wrist when we realised we were no longer moving forwards. The last time you visited you ate biscuits from the cat’s bowl. You didn’t know the word for cat then and we laughed that you said the little dog.

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longlisted Forward March Bradley Samore after Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays

The pitch of the unison ruptures. A clarinet a quarter-step flat.

A trombone a quarter-step sharp. The nasal squeal of a trumpet.

The unease of a flute. A drum major’s whistle leading nowhere mellifluous. The kind of art you stare at, wondering if it was penned by a savant who hears what you can’t or if ink was splattered across the bass and treble clefs accidentally changing the score to Everyone’s Lost.

Meanings emerge and vanish and return as something else, and you don’t know if any of them were made by the composer or the narrative mind’s compulsive search for meaning or both—any place to rest itself—connection, the void, stillness, God—like my coworker explaining how he fell in love: “God knew that wasn’t the job for me, so he had me fired so that I’d need to move back home where I’d meet my wife.”

Your tongue presses the roof. Your eyes grope the walls.

The surrealist credo: It is what it is not. But what it is jars you inside this auditorium—the band still blaring its fracas, one of your friends booing his expectations, the houselights implicating everyone, and when the instruments eventually find their last note on stage, you rise to applaud, but your hands keep together, and you notice for the first time that the instrumentalists have faces.

30

longlisted Gallant Elisabeth Murawski Prom night came and went without us. Tony hadn’t the glamour of the unavailable boy I had a crush on.

We were laying out the school paper, lamenting the missed dance, when he announced I would have taken you, implying if you’d asked.

Totally nonplussed, I don’t remember if I said anything, if I blushed. Graduation was the last time I saw him, his offer tucked away until the day, decades later, I stumbled on the Dobyns poem about the city of missed chances--the place where you go when you’re too slow to act.

31

longlisted He's gone Chrissie Dreier We’re in a Holy Trinity of danger: thunder, trees, a bull. My brother, sister, toy penguin Paddy and I are crouched on the edge of a wood. Lightning splits the moody sky. A bull blocks our path.

He eyes us, stock still; unmoved by the rain or huddle of cows that chew like bored teenagers.

It’s the ultimate stare-off: bull v. children.

Fear and wonder jiggle my innards. I gaze at the beast: its mighty stillness, curved horns like a curved horn hat. We take a chance.

My brother says, Run to the car and don’t stop.

I peg it, misstep, drop my dear Paddy.

My sister grabs my hand; He’s gone.

We hurry forward, I don’t need to look back to know the terrible thing I’ve done.

32

longlisted How I Met Sandy Shoshanna Rockman I met Sandy on a street corner. I was unhappy, wanted a cigarette. Not succumbing to a packet seemed a test — of immeasurable significance.

I’d been grocery shopping. Armed with a string bag of apples, I approached a smoking stranger, assessed him as amiable, made eye-contact and stood aside while he finished up a work call.

We swapped fruit for smokes — I cried as though bartering and crying with strangers was commonplace. In truth, such connections have worked for me — have weeded out some real strangers.

Sandy sat with me on a slatted bench, bought me a latte. After that, we termed ourselves friends — through contortions, conflicts, companionship.

But he’s since taken to re-telling our story — our casual convergence. Revels in the incredulity of listeners. As he recounts, he exposes me. Casts a too-white sheet over my invisible ghosts.

I begin shrinking — He blows smoke. Rivulets and rings into my burrow. Evicts me. Performs me for laughs or sparks — for others.

33

longlisted In Bocca al Lupo Karen Downs-Barton Friday night is the Moon Tarot, balanced between human prudence and animal instincts.

Picture the card with a domestic dog and wolf, engaged in mirrored howlings. Above, I take the mercurial form of sixteen moonbeams. Friday night deals a hand with a manilla envelope fat with cash. My crayfish mother waits at the stage door snippy for money she’ll secrete in her breast pocket. Her jacket bulges a string of gaps like a segmented carapace or the word mammas, cursive ‘m’s’ buttoned neck to hem. On Friday nights, I trust in wolf luck, that when Mum pincers her weekly cut she doesn’t notice the packets’ lightness or resealed flap.

I’ll pop this here for safekeeping. Doll yourself up and wear a dress, you wanna attract a bit of interest.

in bocca al lupo good luck 34

longlisted Infinity, & Zero Jonathan Greenhause

Statistically, it’s probable that improbable things will keep occurring, how at 9:38 a.m., everyone in the Western United States simultaneously blinked; & yesterday, in the Canadian Maritimes, 327 dogs were put to sleep unaware they wouldn’t awaken. Just last week, clouds over Mozambique briefly formed the unmistakable image of the castaways from Gilligan’s Island, & an orphan child in a South Pacific village recited, in English, the entire Emancipation Proclamation without ever having heard it. Given enough time, everything happens, & everything repeats. When we manage to escape a tragic adolescent demise, we grow old enough to effortlessly slip into senescence, how – numerically speaking – we add & subtract ourselves within the bounds of a single equation equal to both infinity & zero; yet putting these quotients aside, it’s just as likely we’re an integral part of the universe as it is we’re helplessly trapped someplace hopelessly outside of it.

35

longlisted Inheritance Gemma Barnett i got his nose we all nose that terrible wit humidity hating hair fistfuls of peanut butter at 3am fingers in our mouth can’t stop eating ourselves wherever we live the same smell i’d use examples but i don’t know what it is detergent / argan oil that’s not right fish balls / cottage cheese not right either i’d have liked the enjoyment of taste at 5 sniffing curtains for broken cardboard in the kitchen we sat i looked at the corners of his mouth gathering white mess from dehydration my scalp itched with embarrassed love i licked my own tapped them raised eyebrows at him when he didn’t have a clue wipe your mouth dad! a wonky collar buttons done up wrong there’s nothing wrong with him it’s me that’s wrong i wish i had enough joy for the both of us i can’t stop thinking when you really listen outside a seagull sounds like it’s stubbed it’s toe this house looks like a dice from the sky never know which side you’ll land on what if i’ve been sitting in the wrong airport hours early eating a dry muffin preparing for a plane that won’t come my brother texts me a photo from New York fucking 8 of them on one guy who was just talking to himself for 20 minutes i don’t know how to fix this

36

longlisted Jumping Into The Blended Aisle Genevieve Flintham You finger your necklace and try not to choke as the doors gyrate and gesticulate: Welcome to Your New Life!

He put the one-pound-coin in the trolley and then left you to push it, so you pretend to like being Captain of an Empty Vessel, while overripe bananas and crusty dates hit you in the gullet.

He throws a punnet of strawberries into the trolley without checking for mould and you wonder whether he lacks care and attention in every area of his life, or just where fruit is concerned.

You’ve taken a chance on mouldy strawberries, on a blended life that you can’t possibly taste yet, because his twins – boys, football and cake, stains and sharp feet – won’t talk to you, and besides, your daughter’s Angel Delight.

Whipped cream? he asks suggestively, while you think about the last time that his sons kicked you. They’re only kids.

Sounds good, you say, letting your sexuality spill over the nearby shoppers, who can’t bear to be around such a functioning new family.

Let’s get fresh cushions, he suggests. Your house is so…beige.

The funky-coloured cushions are already engaging in self-immolation.

You empathise.

Why do we need a full party platter of Indian food? you ask, and he startles, as if he’s seen his ex-wife, but it’s only You, and You are in desperate need of Aisle 11, the drinks aisle, the aisle of self-soothing and Adapting to Change.

We always have picky bits on a Saturday, he says, as if you have Always lived together, as if you haven’t invited his horrible children into your beautiful home, as if you haven’t given up your home office, so your legs burn with the heat of a faulty laptop all day every day, on a sofa that needs replacing, all on the off-chance that He is The One. I’ve never seen you drink whisky before, you say, later, pretending not to be horrified.

Who drinks Supermarket Value Whisky? You wouldn’t put it in your car.

You wish you hadn’t jumped off the cliff. Loneliness isn’t a price to pay, after all, but a seriously misunderstood gift.

You want to get out, but you can’t, or the kids won’t eat. Instead, you stare at the eggs and flour, as if they can make everything wholesome again.

Francine wouldn’t want the boys having sugar, he chastises, as you drop a lead weight in.

You stare at him as if he has tentacles.

You’d talk about your ex too, if you wanted to ruin the mood.

So where did we land on cushions? he asks, clearly thinking about your beige house, where his kids have left jam stains on your nice rug, where you read a book about blended families and it was supposed to be a How-To guide, but maybe it was a Warning, after all.

37

longlisted Many a Slip Dominic James In a moment of rotation keeling over on your back, footing – never certain – lost, before impact: the nimbler mind can sense the light of rock and sky, hear gulls, low croak of crow lift on the tumbling surf whose noisy surge seems thought itself tightening the spine; anticipating shock.

A plunge in rock pools’ quiet might connect the skull with sand but there’s more scope for accident delighting in the cobbled track that – stone by stone – skims shoreline paths whose sharper rocks glint in the sun and matted slime that gleams with brine and – it’s so precarious! – packs filaments of hair with blood.

You ran too fast along the brink, too hot, too eager not to fear as now – no gentle thud – the clap of a collapsing wave might be the crack of bone.

So fleet of foot to giddy chance a graze or two, a boot-full. No. We’ll have no more of rock-hopping.

Pleasure in the game’s tapped out, it falls behind and let it lie.

Take my arm. There is more joy in other reckless pastimes.

38

longlisted Meeting in Bloomsbury Judith Wozniak July 7th 2005

She’s on the bus, the tube is closed.

Across Tavistock Square the boom.

Windows rock. Outside sounds distort as if he’s listening through a conch.

Bitter ash burns his throat, his eyes smart.

A tangle of debris, sirens, people running, the taste of metal. The shattered windows of BMA house sprayed with red mist.

That spring, he’d scooped up petals carpeted round the Hiroshima tree, garlanded her with cherry blossom.

She’d talked about home, the ocean.

He barely notices the driver kneeling by the wreckage, chanting Kyrie eleison.

Kyrie eleison Lord have mercy 39

longlisted Miracle of Existence Hollie Garraway Crystallised in the bud of our becoming, we are, snowdrops, golden codes of light language, wind chimes and waterfalls, howling at the moon, barefoot, dripping honey.

The miracle of being born into existence, a thousand mercurial facets unravelling like manuscripts unbridled flower fairy.

Leave her unfettered like kaleidoscopic butterfly wings to discover myths and mysteries a purity of heart, into the unknown she is her ancestors’ greatest prayers to exist as a wildflower, free to bloom in a time of her own choosing.

It takes a village we were told but they burned us on purpose to drink the milk without honouring its sacred sweetness is still one of the biggest crimes in society to sit in ceremony when the time comes to understand and savour our place in the great order of things we want our rites of passage back.

40

longlisted My daughter found this emerald on the beach Olivia Walwyn Picked out and kept, out of all the rest of the flints and sandstones, carnelians, amber, chalk. It rests in my pocket, edges smoothed. Not exactly a piece of rubbish any more. Salvaged like the very best bit.

How it must blush, as bright as fresh grass wet with dew on a sunny morning to feel the way it’s held; to remember the way it was scooped up and gazed at, like something precious.

Handed over, for safekeeping.

Held to the sun, so the light could shine through, like stained glass in a holy building.

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longlisted My Grandfather Delivering Fruit Machines, 1975 Jonathan Edwards They’re hunched there at the bar, him and the man who tips the wink, who taps his hat, who has a name around these parts. They’re hunched the way men talk who talk of money. They’re hunched there for an hour, two, and when he stands to leave, my grandad, he’s a man with business. Two days later, he’s rounding a corner in the works van, too fast, moonlighting for beer money, when the back door flies open, and the fruit machine – secured in a hurry – lies in the road. He’s two streets over at a red light, when he looks in the rear view mirror and sees the door flapping. Heading back, he finds it there in the street, the fruit machine, the glass smashed and all the village has of luck broken, toppled on its side. As traffic slows and folk jump out to help they find him there, my grandfather, kneeling in the street, scratching his head, wiping his brow, leaning in now to see one cherry, two, and there, in the last space, the one that will never quite fall into place.

42

longlisted On Not Becoming Curator of Keats-Shelley House Isabella Mead London, 19 July 2022

It was the hottest day on record.

Italy seemed a heady presence in the room; the AC was turned off for the interview, and heat seeped in teasingly under the blinds and fell across the table in golden filaments.

Welcome. Shall we start with your presentation?

A BBC journalist, fresh from relaying a dizzying enormity of reportage, was testing the edges of my rose-tinted dreams and pressing for elusive strands of knowledge.

So what in your opinion was the pull of Italy for the English Romantics? I could gorge on this question, but I saw nothing but a tiny room, Severn sketching a sleeping profile of Keats, shading in the soft sweat beading his forehead.

Perhaps at that moment the shutters were opened, letting in muted 3am conversations from the Spanish Steps, the balmy night air, the opulent scent of bougainvillea, the plashing of the fountain in the square.

Please describe Spectrum’s principles of collections care. I could not answer the question, could only succumb to the gradual soft-focus of the room, sensing the incessant rasping of cicadas, the vespas and sirens and trundle of the tram-lines, the golden sunlight across the Roman Forum where city walls taper into cordial.

I blinked. Do you have any questions for us?

43

The AC was back on, and the blinds shivered, as Rome’s shadows stirred beyond the window.

Thank you for your time, we’ll be in touch.

I emerged, exchanged my sticky heels for flipflops.

The street was deserted, apocalyptic, the pavement white, the windows shuttered.

Across Hyde Park I passed groups splayed out on parched grass and sunlight taunted me all the way to the tube as I mulled over my responses. That night the news claimed this summer will be the coolest to come; today was just the shadow of a magnitude.

44

longlisted Rebirth Sheila Aldous There you have it: the sky is brooding indigo like the self-inflicted ruptures you once were walking the backstreets of New York.

Like the hypodermic habit swaying in the moonlight on Times Square addicted to the dark.

Like murder crawling towards you on the croc’s back, the armoured scutes moonlit in the throng.

Then you have this: a pocket of dawn.

Like a new beginning healing the ground encouraging the seeds with the ringing of bells.

Like May Day tunes singing new light on an English hillside welcoming in the chance of change.

Like the razz-ma-tazz of life suddenly bursting forth dancing on your scars.

Like the child you yearn for born from the light of a star, smiling just for you, in the middle of the night.

45

longlisted Rock, Paper Norman Miller Love is that game, you know, the one with rock, scissors, flesh made paper.

Forget the endless draws, when open hand stretches to open hand, and rather than accept fortune we do it all again: I present my rock, you wrap yourself round me; you show your palm, I cut it; gentle fingers shape a fallen victory V that meets a fist.

It is fun, really.

A way to decide whether to love, a way to decide how to live until it's time to stop playing.

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longlisted Russet Shoshanna Rockman Mid-morning Monday, and it’s already hot – for Autumn. The road unpaved. A new lover up in that general direction, a rural property beyond Ballan. A new row of expectations or hopes, scenic views at the least. I am alone in my big car on an empty narrow road winding to somewhere, or nowhere of significance. To someone who will or will not reach me — this season or next. The trees on either side lift and lean to brush fronds, so that the ground I roll over is a kinetic patchwork of light and shade that blinks like dozens of tiny forest eyes, and the dust and debris billows in ditches, until I look again and again as I drive, and I see that the whirling leaves and bits of bark are in fact butterflies, entire colonies, russet clouds at every juncture of that road.

More life than leaves. Not blown by the motion of my car. But flying as I drive on by. A synchronicity that rushes on and on to gear me down — an internal stop while I speed.

That enclave. Butterflies and dust. For the longest stretch, arrival doesn’t matter.

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longlisted Seagulls Steven Duggan It was a wet but warm evening nudging sunset, a linen sky, cries from a seagull left behind; alone among the procession about the harbour I paused to let a stroller pass just then to realise that I was not, in fact, happy merely happier.

An unwanted epiphany as most epiphanies are and one which made me look back in search of that bird, alien no longer but kindred perhaps, the assumption I’d made about him forcing the change from sympathy to empathy as is always the case when another's distress echoes our own.

This new life, but six months in, reframed by a random thought pushing up in the space I'd allowed in allowing a father to pass with his sleeping child though my view of the seagull's cry, itself speculative and fanciful his cry in truth indistinguishable from those of hunger or of warning had hinted at the conscious thought to come.

We can fool ourselves but not our hearts it seems, despite the want or need to do so: but standing in the midst of a procession is foolish if not selfish, so I’ll follow the seagull either out to sea or home.

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longlisted Suicide: Chasms or Mountains?

Nova Molteno They would say, If they didn’t know us.

I could fall into a chasm of rampant swords; I promise it will be peaceful.

If, after, you’d make me into bone-orchids— (my shoulder blades and pelvis as the petals, my femurs as the stems) you can be the last to kiss me before I fall to my death.

Or I’ll grow my hair beyond my legs, like Rapunzel. And it can cushion my neck, like luscious silk, while it hangs me afloat, by an aspen branch that kills, in the Skarstind mountains; I’ll die holding hands with the avalanching hills.

They would say, I think, If they didn’t know us.

49

longlisted The Soap-Dishes in the Shower Block at Alcatraz Isabella Mead I’d seen the films and could savour the echoing halls of strap-iron bars and screeching doors, the steel spiral staircase and gun gallery, conjure Al Capone’s banjo and jangling keys or conspire with the spectre in Cell Block D; yes, could immerse myself easily and shake it off freely, but I cannot wash away the image of this.

The row of soap-dishes in the shower room.

Their stern, silent presence, their defiant forms: no smooth scoop of ceramic, no scallop, but metallic, angular trays, at sharp intervals along the stark bars of the empty stands under the white glare of batten lights lining the length of the communal block where visitors queue for the audio tour, make awkward talk, or look outside beyond the window, where golden-crowned sparrows settle near frills of pink gladioli and preen each other, rooting for specks of dirt in the feathers, framing the sunlight on the swathes of blue sea that carry the eye to San Francisco.

And blink, back here, to the shower block where each soap-dish holds silent court.

No call to order, no water, no lather, no soap.

Each dish is an open mouth, each one a soundless yowl for touch, for tenderness, for a last chance gone.

50

longlisted Tidings Nikheel Gorolay I didn’t ask to be dealt this basted brown skin, patches pulled back where I’ve dug to find something beneath to test your words that I’m different.

Maybe the answer is behind my scorched salmon lips, peppered with cuts where I’ve not licked them for fear of my tongue giving song to sounds that make perfect sense.

But you cannot comprehend them and refuse to.

Looking into my eyes might not find it either – only your despair mirrored back at you if I were to ask why are you here?

Family, history, identity, race, (colour)?

What about fortune, luck, chance, odds, accident?

Things that mean I’m from there and now here and you’re from here and there is somewhere far somewhere foreign somewhere frightening.

Somewhere like here.

51

longlisted To Become a Famous Rooster, You Must First Ship Sand Genevieve Flintham He tells you that Rocky is the LOUDEST ROOSTER IN THE WORLD, as if this is his own idea and not something said by the murderous neighbour, Old Bu Rita – owner of a Kintamani and forefront hater of bules, tourists, and especially surfers – you know they’re shipping in sand now?

What, we don’t have sand?

He wants to make Rocky famous, he’s heard about YouTube from the bule kids at the bule nursery, pasty faces learning A, B, C, while you take Panji with you to steal corn at dawn, batting away the charcoal fireworks of bugs that interrupt the morning Mosque calls, trying to avoid the blade of the rusty machete, which reflects terracotta and sunrise, because it is always so early.

You tell him that there isn’t a chance in hell that Rocky will become famous, because it is healthy to kill a child’s dreams, and you sweep the old blade through robbed corn and curse the impotence of the paddies.

It is not enough to have paddies during the ebb and flow of recession; corn can be eaten, and the husks used to make animal bedding, which your wife, your patient wife, sells back to the same farmer that you are stealing from.

“Uh-uh-uhhhhh,” Panji calls, while your face drips.

What is that?

“The bule kids say that Rocky goes ‘Cock a doodle do’. Have you ever heard anything so stupid? It is UH-UH-UHHHH.” You try not to shake with anger because Panji should stay away from those bule kids, the offspring of the sand shippers, the beer drinkers.

But he keeps sneaking around the back of the nursery, his skull lifted by the universe.

One afternoon, they watch Chicken Run and Panji’s imagination runs alongside it.

You are busy feeding the chickens, skitter-scatter, and shouting at the herons, ivory wings killing the paddies in a search of eels, while Old Bu Rita’s dog yap-yap-yaps and you wish that it was a fierce wolf that might rip you apart.

“We did it,” Panji says, and he’s clutching a pile of yellow paper.

You ask what, while your wife ekes more corn from a cascade of tattered string.

“He’s famous, the bule kids put him online. People are coming to see him.

Tonight.

I need to make tickets, I promised them tickets.

See Ayah, you said there wasn’t a chance in hell.

Now we can afford uniforms, I’ve sold three hundred rupias in tickets already.

See Ayah?”

Behind the boy’s Ayah, the broken barn shows a slice of painful redundancy; the rice paddies reflect the clouds.

A white heron swoops into the sky, its beak spilling stolen eel.

52

longlisted Today the sky is full of threads— Alice White little strands of spiderweb, each attached to a spiderling attached to nothing: Every one of them is simply being carried by the breeze. I watch as I drive through rugged country, my vehicle one I must direct, my future either right or left at the next crossing. I decide.

A sudden stag could stop me yet—this car could crash a million different ways—but that turn, that choice, is mine. I do not want it.

I want to catch a thread of gossamer glinting in this last light, let it lift me through the window, from road to open sky— to my home, or doom. Let the wind decide.

53

longlisted Twenty-two Mary Mulholland We saw warnings but the trees were on fire, they were that red, and we just pulled in, pitched up and leant against their spines, watching the evening burn. John rolled a joint, started stumming his guitar. I hummed along, lit charcoal, cooked beans. Couldn't wash as we forgot the jerry can. When the fire died, we slipped into our bags and gazed skywards.

It was all spangled black. The redwoods, too, were black now, and grown taller, as if trying to touch the stars. We took turns: Venus, Orion, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, till John said, who put bears in the sky? and that creased me up.

By the time I stopped everything was quiet.

I figured John must be sleeping, but I couldn't take my eyes off the flickering night, wondering if someone on another planet was marvelling at a pinprick of blue. A breeze touched my face like silk. I fancied it was the trees breathing, imagined the world holding onto me, stopping me drifting into space. In my mind I was four again, at midnight mass, believing in angels, ladders to heaven, hands joined in prayer capturing scents of frankincense, candlewax.

I filled my lungs with earthy smells, lingering embers, the cool of air. And the silence.

As if we'd trespassed onto holy ground.

By morning, the sky was back to being blue, the redwoods red again, John back to hollering: let’s get moving as he kicked away all trace of us.

I was still somewhere else as we left, hardly gone a mile when a ranger flagged us down, Been camping?

John said, No, sir, and the ranger gave a slow shake of his head, muttered something about bears, let us go.

And off we drove, John side-splitting about lucky stars.

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longlisted Whale Song Gloria Sanders Big-bellied promises push and, after all, wasn't it our wish?

We said whale music and birthing pool no drugs near our jewel and oh we waited and I ached.

I stared at totems, calling prayers to this Goddess and that, and you've never chanted like you did then – Come to our aid oh come to our aid.

Let us see soon the life we have made.

Hours of asking white coats for answers, proud to hold your hand and walls knocked through for a nursery already and colours chosen and family congratulating and all manner of stories ready and lung capacity smugly expanded and no thanks not for me just water and our daughter oh, our daughter, and names and star signs and you not prepared for us.

But we with vitamins injections hormones begging needing timing wanting pushing breathing

and you

breathing you hopeful you tiny you angry you wise you.

We wend our way home doorbell-scared.

55

student showcase garbage hill Bon Apaga there inside, it sounds like garbled words a garbled mind spits out garbled sensibilities and then what? all there is, inside– I like to listen to good music I wonder how you make a sound a sound that sounds goodcan you really make something out of nothing? you probably can’t but what you might do is… turn something into something else. as long as I am still thinking there is still something there to turn or change or make or feel or touch or experience or breathe in or taste or love or cry to or make a lasting impression with but what do you do with these motions spiralling ruminations this funk ain’t got no pattern to it it’s all garbage with no beginning a scattered mess from this angle… but there’s the glowing, shimmering sparkles which you can see small glints of when you turn your head or turn the object to let the light shine on its surface but with too much garble, how do you sort through all of it? ==> Here’s the cool thing We do not exist by ourselves, we see beauty and joy and that cathartic feeling in whatever art does that for us and we use that as light - a cool guide on our adventures around garbage hill.

Waves. Reverberations. Another viewpoint. The de ja vu experience.

I feel like I’ve realised that the hill isn’t as ugly as I thought it’d usually be This garbage got some charm to it A charm that I knew was there but was too shy to point out…

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BUT I LOVE YOU AND I SHOULD HAVE SHOUTED YOUR NAME WHEN NO ONE ELSE WOULD and you were never garbage in the first place and when I truly dig into it maybe not all of you are so well and swell but the term of garbage is not one I should harbour so strongly on you my dear children You came from me, my own head I don’t appreciate you enough I shall nurture you so you can grow into something beautiful ~0~

57

student showcase Fish Juno-Blake Cree I ask him, Dad, why can't I go play?

I ask him, But, Dad, why can't I play with her?

I go over to the fish And kneel on the grassy Dirt, rolled-up sleeves wet Arms deep In a mossy river bank.

My metal hook in the guts Of a flapping fish, Until it stops moving.

I sling it in the bucket With the rest.

He says, Play with the fish, James..

He says, Just leave her alone, James.

Dad, I'm bored.

He looks at me.

I thought you liked playing with the fish, James.

I shrug at the river.

Yeah, Dad, I used to. But I want to play with her now. Can't I? He takes the hook from my hand, tucks it in his pocket.

No, James.

She isn't a fish.

I stare at them swimming.

She is like a fish.

Dad, can I have my hook back?

He hesitates.

Not now, James.

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student showcase Save Me Juno-Blake Cree I'll do it.

I told you: without you, I do not exist.

I told you I would stand on a ledge with the wind wild beneath my wings.

I will shear them off, leave the pair of bloody white feathers for you to find beside my shoes.

I told you what would happen if you left me. Even if you conspired to try.

I saw it when you looked at me, like I was a ghost, like I was a lie.

So I gathered up my skirts and drowned in vodka and sweat, stood with my legs shaking above a familiar track.

The one we met on, so you should know where to find me.

Come before it is too late and reclaim me as yours. Or else unstick a honeyed body after the train has chugged away.

I can hear your voice and my name above the wind and engines, I can hear the boots she bought you struggling to get here I know that you can see me, so I turn and wave.

"Save me," I whisper and launch myself into my grave.

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student showcase Lemon (extract – Before) Isabelle Fairhurst When we first met, you said you were like a lemon, Bitter more than sweet.

I laughed.

Completely forgetting that lemon flavour, is my favourite treat.

Like a lemon, you were bitter Sarcastic, teasing, ready to poke fun; But there is a reason why, lemons are often compared to the sun.

Because in your smile, your eyes, your laughter, there was light Darling, the glimpse of your heart is a beautiful sight.

In the accidental touches, The longing stares, The way I always ended up next to you.

I found something: Not love, not hate, but a comfort.

You keep my feet on the ground And every day, I can't help but mutter "Oh, for god sake."

Because I thought I had built enough walls, to keep you down, In order for no attachment to be found But for fuck sake, You still found a way, With that bloody stupid face.

What I'm saying is, I don't need the world, the moon, Or even a star.

I only ask that keep my feet on the ground By being who you are.

So darling, my sweet boy, Will you be mine?

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student showcase Allure in Black Kester Grieve He’s marred in crocuses; he marches on, he focuses on what he hardly knows of it.

The wheel’s not broken if he dares not even break the spokes of it.

That dawn in far off clouds has not awoken yet, the storm has barely spoken yet, and yet his clothes still soak in it.

Like a courser champing at a broken bit, two gleaming sapphires set within a stone-cold pit.

That brazen talk is something wild hearts don’t permit those tender feet walk on a bed of flaming coals but pass right over it while closing ranks of spurned advances choke and spit.

I’ll open this discussion with some token wit: If she likes cigarettes, has blonde hair with brown roots and all the ends are split, what’s at the bottom of the barrel?

Only smoke and shit.

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student showcase Angels Wear Armour Kester Grieve The blood between these pages is the kind shed beneath skies whose rains swept it away long before the lines were written.

What is a drop of it in a deluge if not a single letter in a verse?

No walls were beaten down by words, no tyrants’ whims by floods.

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student showcase Doors and Boxes Cameron House Much of me lives s’rounded by doors and boxes And though I can move around so freely I s’pose it resembles how Fort Knox is, Even with nothing behind lock and key.

Door after door, one thing is a promise: I’ll be back where I was, a detainee.

If I learn to leave the past where it falls, Might I be free of these boxes and halls?

I must learn to package these thoughts away.

Taking these memories, I must make a choice To look down at each chest, then I can say: I’ve lived this enough, I’ll learn to rejoice!

The time has now come to beckon dismay Harnessing the fear to find my lost voice.

I’ll command the boxes, build a large plinth From where I see freedom from this labyrinth!

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student showcase The Abandoned Patch Evie Molyneux Bubbles of orange, Blushing cream and coral, Fuzzy vines knotted in protective loops, Hugging us tightly in preparation, Bracing for the annual suffocation, Twelve or so glorious weeks, Rich with a thrumming, life giving, light.

Snuffed out under the first fall of snow.

A cloth of icy cold that seeps into our cores, We begin to cave under its weight, Dwindling into barely half of the space, We once so proudly grew to inhabit.

The boots stomp overhead, Crunching a symmetry into our surface, Allowing for bleeds of crisp, bright, light, To meet our flesh once more.

We lie, waiting, aching, hoping for a sudden spring to thaw our moulds and let us breathe as deeply as before.

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student showcase Candlelit Karishma Natu open chairs, chatter, clinking glasses. you stare at the candlelight flame like it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. table for two, two plates either side of kindle. spilled effervescent laughter, smiles so big you couldn’t fit them in your pocket. if i could, i’d cascade all over again like complementary wine. but you can’t compromise with change. by the end of dinner, talking fades to clashing of empty plates, cutlery crosses, chairs tucked. the candlelight sees its way out. you stare at the flickering embers. somehow it’s still the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

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student showcase tree surgeon Molly Ward you carved your name inside my heart as if it were a tree forever more I’ll find you there a stowaway inside of me but won’t you cut this tree down now and rid me of your memory for your love is void my heart destroyed and you cannot stay for free

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student showcase dear fellow homosexual, i see you. i see the way you carry yourself, as though in flight. i see the weight like no rock or boulder carried on your shoulders will shatter that immaculate posture. i see you, fellow homosexual. you are elder. you are mature, of knowing. you probably know the disgust of others like the back of your own worn hand and oh! how you slap them away, worn down. i see you, fellow homosexual. i see the signs of a laboured life, of friends and loved ones lost to a decade's diseased plight. of foes questioning your own. but you have worked yourself up, Your Highness, Dear Queen, you are self-evident, monarchally aspiring. fellow homosexual i could glance at you from a mile. fellow homosexual with the same pride since 69’. i see you, leaving my bus stop at b'mth train station and passing by and spiritually - perhaps maybe we pass a smile.

Ben Whittall

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student showcase The Endless Promise Carmilla Williamson When Destiny came knocking at my door, I wept for my life sentence in his book.

But with a promise, he broke my shackles, tore out my pages, scratched my name, and bade me become my own author.

When Death sat waiting in my bathroom, I begged to wash away on a flood of pills.

But with a promise, she raised her ankh, bore me by wing from an early demise, and bade me treasure my second chance.

When Dream bent over me in my sleep, I feared my old self would haunt me.

But with a promise, he donned his helm, guided me in vanquishing the nightmare, and bade me manifest my new reality.

When Destruction pillaged my trappings, I clung to the threads of my blank visage.

But with a promise, he lay down his sword, painted me with fashion and medication, and bade me cultivate my own creation.

When Desire caressed me in bruised secret, I craved to make cruel hearts lust for me.

But with a promise, they drank from my lips, filled their glass heart with my self-loathing, and bade me lash out at my persecutors.

When Despair crawled out of my mirror, I retched to see my dysphoric reflection.

But with a promise, she hooked my disgust, gutted the last echoes of my manhood, and bade me embrace indomitable hope.

When Delirium laid siege to my thoughts, I grieved over a sea of impossible visions.

But with a promise, she honed my reason, cast swirling delight into my womanhood, and bade me at last enjoy inner peace.

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student showcase Swimmer’s Gospel Hailey Wood The grief in my gut is a hungry god, nesting in dark corners, burrowing herself in places I cannot stretch to pluck her, insatiable and unspeaking.

She rots in tides once served as sanctuary, settled in every freckle of the sea, constant and all consuming, that slow spill I am sick to death of.

She swallows you whole with the rest of the world, each fragment up - you are nothing but soul, digesting your anxieties, spitting you out into cold reincarnation.

The grief in my gut is a mother fond of cruelty, there is beauty to be found in her, a delicacy in her waves, saved only for those who can swim.

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acknowledgements Sincerest thanks go to the following individuals and teams who have played a role in or supported the AUB International Poetry Prize 2023: Prof Paul Gough – Principal and Vice Chancellor Dr Jon Renyard – University Secretary and Registrar Dr Jonathan Carr – Director Bournemouth Film School Glyn Maxwell – Chair of Judges Dr James Cole – Course Leader BA Hons Creative Writing Ronan Kelly – Lecturer Creative Writing Dr Kevan Manwaring – Senior Lecturer Creative Writing Elizabeth Woodgate – AUB International Poetry Prize Organiser 2022 Billy Cooke - AUB International Poetry Prize Administrator 2022 Dale Hurst and the AUB Web Team Liz Hammond-Laing and the AUB Income/Shop Team Charlotte MacKay and the AUB Marketing Team The National Poetry Library National Association for Writers in Education

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