Issue 25: Natalie Ann Holborow
Never date a poet
She says never date a poet / they are forever
bowling their souls through doorways /
cowering and wanting / staggering stairs
to the moon / perhaps then you will confide in her
you have always adored poets / the brute pen /
the velvet coat dropped from her back /
begging to be touched / the shelled knuckle
trawling the spine for hours / you will ask her
is that okay / dinner is a plate of impressionism / too sad to taste /
she will take a cold sip / carry your new face
on a plate / and write okay with her nail / between you
callas sigh out tedious eternities / water-jugs forever stagnating /
you say so / knowing the scrubbed red of her eye
marks two hysterical months of longing / she won’t bother to engage /
the dull piano lulls and soothes / the slow salt snows
why do you not weep / her naked body a question mark
rising to meet you / bitter cold out and in / small cold gods
in bathrooms / cold hands / porcelain / some deeper chill
wafts back / holds you close / splayed on the bathroom mat /
hairs autograph the sink / nails scar the soap
perfume / shower-mist / the vulnerable wrist
dips to a drown / why do you not weep /
every pause is the end of the world.
Gestalt Therapy
tell me / what does the chair mean / the cloud
coloured padding / headshake / wind slapping
sad bluebells / okay then / what does the word
apricity taste like / warm skin and apricots
but back to the chair / can you calcify it
to a wishbone / tell me can you put
a person on it / she doesn’t ask what the chair
tastes like / old nuts and dust / iron tang /
has she ever met a metaphor /
what is empathy / earth roots / wires
hissing dirt / the mad garden hand
patting / wet compost fists / what colour
is empathy / wipe old nuts and dust
from my tongue / citalopram weighs
an eyeful of coins / tell me / no tell me /
ever snapped a chair leg and felt it
Small and the birds
she says who is Small / Small is not me
but part of me / sweeps from me
like a headrush / calcified grin / all twirls
and jabbing angles / slithery wings / like a crow/
no not like a crow / she points at the bird outside
it blurs in the rain / feathers and trash /hot static /
or a snake / no not a snake / its unassuming coil
has no capacity for scrabbling the way she does /
sticky-nailed / chain-mail of frost prickling the neck
besides why does the owl not swoop her away / do you
ever feel like an owl / I tick the box no never an owl / Small
hoots softly at my back / froths a ring of feathers
at her throat / says we shouldn’t talk about her like this
Bodkin
Twice a day I take a trip to the annexe toilets
for insulin, hold the hypodermic needle
like a bodkin. Afterwards, I watch
the bug of blood track my belly
in a relieved little puff,
crush it just short of the waistband.
Sometimes, You Cry in this Car
The great shivery out-breath that tries to bear
the world’s ache comes rasping out again
then backs up into silence, waiting to fall into memory-trap.
It makes no sense: heat murmuring on the bonnet of the car,
its deaf engine that might have once roared
into summer, the sunlight on its registration plate like houseflies
on butter. Sometimes, you cry in this car
with the engine off and that feeling you sometimes get
like stepping into a cramped elevator, a train
without any schedule, both hands on the wheel sticky
as though you’d pressed them too long
against the shimmering fever of the universe.
Small Swallows a Fly
Tonight we are having wine for dinner our favourite
plum-shine wet lacquer we could even pretend
we are swimming foxy reds oak-smoke
cool odours of vanilla rising let’s wander vineyards
in dark skirts I tilt the glass to my lips
gulp downwards flush upwards pour another
Small licks a peanut puffs her cheeks sometimes
Small tells jokes with her breath or apes about
pretending to be humongous one time we downed a fly
with wine-drops trying to get it drunk the drops she said
are lava running her fingers along the menu she dared me
to eat the fly you no, you sweat broke out on me blood
slugged along the arteries I drank until the blood was wine
moths as big as hands swarmed the lamps and later
counting three, two, one giggling like clocks Small and I
pressed a wing to each of our tongues swallowed the fragile lace
20
I run twenty miles that afternoon
in the slanting rain backslashes who knew
tiny towns could have such dark perimeters
in early spring the cows are slow silky-uddered
I lap them steaming across meadows
wet pastures hot milk smell chugging in clouds
I slap at my fringe scatter beads of clear drizzle
the bulls are thick and fierce stocky trunks
shunting the cold hills I sprint harder hair flapping
like a sparrow trapped and sometimes on days
like these I am a bird hatching in reverse crunching
the shell back whole I’ve outrun the dumb cattle
but really all this the dull beat of my heel scuff
of gravel is rain gone about erasing each toppled stone
dulling to a warning habitual isolation eighteen miles
is an act of casual hell immutable famine at twenty
I say it will happen the drizzle suffused
to a smirr a dark candelabra of yews I reel
to a halt at twenty a bull stops dead on a hill
Natalie Ann Holborow (b. 1990) was born and grew up in Swansea, where she continues to live and work. She took BA English and MA Creative Writing degrees at Swansea University. Her first collection, And Suddenly You Find Yourself (2017, Parthian), was launched at the International Kolkata Literary Festival and listed in Wales Arts Review’s ‘Best of 2017’.
She is a multiple prize-winning poet, on the page and as a performer, winner of the 2015 Terry Hetherington Award and a recent finalist in the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Competition. Her second collection, from which these poems were taken, is Small (2020, Parthian).
Copyright © 2021 by Natalie Ann Holborow, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
