We are fully sure that a single writing workshop will not save the world but at least it may offer a way of saving the bland way in which writing workshops are ‘curated’ with the same bland energy as a bespoke crouton home delivery service. What on earth are poets doing charging £400 for ‘mentoring’ anyway? Right? Their faux-meticulousness and preposterous and absurd trivia about ‘oxford commas’ bores us. It is the great shame of having to write in these times, to be amongst such rampant desires to ‘influence’ and yet maintain the status quo. A Big Yawn to all’o that!

How to work, how to write, how to keep things moving – these are the primary questions that motivate us. Every day we are catapulted into tasks, clicking our way through the day’s humdrum with little to no time to reflect, to endure a moment, to have more than a few pranayams to experience duration. What we say when we propose that writing is a form of labour is the counter-valent under-and-surround of the breath that refuses to have profit extracted from that labour, writing is a stubborn labour that constantly shifts and blocks itself, it wants us to engage with it on terms that are in a fitful state of renewal. And so to do that we say this: writing without reading is like food with no seasoning! The basic elements can be simple, we Xeroxed a few things, Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘The History of the Voice’, Keston Sutherland’s ‘Revolution and Really Being Alive’, and something we wrote in 2021 called ‘Notes Towards A Manifesto’. We love combining critique, history, and the pyrotechnic poetics of Marxist thought. We won’t summarise – if you’re reading this stop – go and read those things first! You can request PDFs via www.the87press.co.uk.

Oh what a ride! To surf it and to connect, what Brathwaite might say is a continuum of sound emerging amongst those of us who wish to participate together in this radical act of co-producing literature, responding to the same stimuli, letting our voices co-emanate in discussion’s cadence. Learning from our Surrealist forbearers, we think we think too much, and thus to encourage the participant to engage in timed automatic writing, the rule being: don’t let your pen leave the page, and write whatever comes out in your mind! From automatic to manic, give yourself 25 minutes to write, stick a timer on, but hide the clock so you don’t know what time it is, and let yourself be free on the page! You’ve got one objective: write!

But writing without a stimulus that happens a-priori to the exercise would be silly, you need seasoning! Jesse Darling’s Exhibition Enclosures gives us that, we saw it for the first time with our students/participants/new-friends! It shows us how the decay of the Elgin Marbled Europe reveals beneath its mask the horror of surveillance capitalism, the disgusting captivity which renders some lives liveable and other lives extinguishable, the habeas viscus of it all, the viscosity of liquid crystals churning up images from body cam footage of the policemen or the occupation soldier, or the strange hybrid informer that is the mainstream fake socialism of talking heads like Paul Mason! Around this enclosure within an enclosure (very #meta we like!) we perambulated like good late/lazy modernists, thinking about the graphic representation of metal skeletons and structures that have power over us – yes we thought about how to articulate a critique of the systemic problem of having our time stolen and having our attempts to steal back recorded as evidence for our eventual trials in the court of well guarded cultural opinion. Bah Humbug! Enjoy these poems, they were written for you with a generous spirit, with nerves on edge, and with a playful seriousness in their heart.

Suzanna Slack

I tried to shoplift I tried to ride the train I tried to read the essay I tried to look at the artwork

I bought products
I tried to look in the garden I went in the garden. Kendrick Lamar on sexual violence said set free my mother set free our children the heart’s filled with hatred, keep the body sacred, so many people were smiling so hard at so many dogs on the train two beggars

“beggars”

as I disembarked were discussing the necessity of not crying or being angry when people refuse to give you money, the Black man was saying to the white that it wasn’t fair on people to do that, he was saying it behind me as we ascended the stairs I was too tired about it and grateful for the blue hydrangea given to my daughter for her 23rd birthday as it was the same colour as the house we once lived in— my dastardly daughters and me had sat under the tree behind our block and got covered in the white blossom of it, what kind of tree - a tall tall tree I still did not know the name of after twenty six years, smelling of smoke watching the dots of firelight in the washing machine drum

I was supposed to be doing two days of online service for prisoners with addictions: close the prisons! dismantle them brick by brick or quicker but meanwhile don’t just abandon those in there. I was not making sense of anything the internet was glitchy the sound was fucked I wasn’t going to go to the writing workshop because it was too far. Although only a few stops on the train but I had a lot of pain. It was sunny and it had been my birthday and something seemed to suggest I should go so I went. Then I was on that train gawping at the sheer number of cute dogs out riding the packed train with their owners to Hampstead Heath

the other train passengers would beam at those dogs, as if those dogs were somehow celestial, or carried some sort of ecstasy drug that was druggier than the drug ecstasy, that just to behold these cute dogs (and yes they were all very cute dogs) was to be transported, they weren’t just better than people, they were better than life itself, they were better than anything you could think of to designate the best of things. To just beam and smile and marvel that way, their whole bodies radiating love at these dogs. It chilled me to the bone and then I gave that bone to every cute dog. Was that what fascism was? This dog-love?

After the writing workshop, which I had to leave early because I experienced an acute episode of sensory overload, there were still too many dogs on the train home again. There was one large cute dog, with a bandana around its neck, looking hot and peeved and embarrassed, but taking up the whole of the middle of the train lying down quite sprawled out and people just did that goofy gaze, one mother and her daughter totally drugged-out on the spectacle and the teenage daughter twinkling her fingers at the dogs muzzle, straining forwards, the dog just looking awkward or tired or whatever you would look like if people just did that to you. The girl was reading a book version of Toturo. I was really exhausted and needed to sit and a space became free and I stepped over the dog, not worrying too much about it, because the person who kept that dog hostage needed to help that dog feel less complicated about being a god but also a slave and I sat down. When I got off the train I saw a young white girl with crutches leaning against the side of the train. It was sad that homeless people and disabled people or even old people or even babies, weren’t gazed at with the love that dogs, who didn’t even ask to be treated that way, had to be gazed at, as if they were life’s elixir. At least in this part of London near Hampstead in 2022.

I had been listening to Kendrick Lamar and it was Giles Peterson on Radio 6 playing most of his new album, in particular the song Mother and I could not understand how I used to go to Giles Peterson nights at the weekends when I was eighteen and nineteen and now I was fifty one so Giles Peterson had to be old, it was weird how people just kept going doing things, also I had not stolen a book. That sudden impulse that came to me late in life, to experiment with shoplifting, had passed. “These beaches are up for grabs. The tourists say they own them. They are the ultimate frontier, visible evidence of our past wanderings and our present distress.” I read. That was who Glissant was! When we lit the fire inside the washing machine drum:

Find the snails inside it Laure had said, first.

I was not shaven headed and faggy on Hampstead Heath - I wore a hat that covered every bit of skin - face, neck, sunglasses - headphones - a house around my face - you were the ribbon book when I was confined with infants - you were me as a boy on Hampstead Heath on dry leaves - you were time passing - I was ready to be entirely alone - there were some days I became very serious: what was truthfully possible, how could this even happen, with this much pain - but they say nobody even knows what pain is - I thought that was a dangerous discussion. She drove to a monastery outside Rome that day, she knew how to live but was permanently dying and I was full of Big Mac and cream cake - I didn’t know how to describe the plight of the dastardly daughter except to acknowledge I got everything very wrong - I took out my favourite tablecloth which was actually just a piece of printed fabric which still had the charity shop label saying £2.45 - Save the Children, maybe - the purple tufts like purple Mayazaki soot sprites because you like purple now and I used to, said one of the dastardly daughters - the other made me a triple layer cream cake - - I loved another person with the name Suzanna Slack on the internet who liked peach and jade and turquoise - her photograph kept me safe - the fire in the bones, the ants in the home. My work of art was keeping my home clean.

- the city was a curveball - what if we were all quiet and un-named and sitting listening - I meant all the time - all the time - it doesn’t matter how good you are - I will become giddy and nauseous - I just wanted my home clean and humble and no drying up to put away - the draining board dry and polished - yes I said polished - some people have different riches - some people wanted straight and polished teeth - some their draining boards - draining board sounded archaic - I wanted to redesign kitchens - that would be poetry. But not for the rich. Kitchens for everyone to gather in - beauty not just functionality - kitchens as works of art - with rotating supervisors who knew about the hygiene, the order and the beauty - who were not long suffering high minded or passive aggressive - were just delighted by it - everyone would take turns learning

my stomach churned from the cake or the dogs or the pain or the revelation of my nakedness- I had slept bottomless and I felt stung, I mean I took it personally, by the bites on the cheeks - the bites on the best creamiest parts of my ass were so rude to me, I could sense the crouching beast of the musty goose down duvet the same way I could feel the supermarket rainbow roses wilting and I’d take it to the launderette feeling ravished so disgracefully by the three large bumps on my creaminess - then my arms broke out in a burn - from wrists up to the fleshy upper parts - underneath especially - long burns - sunflower seeds in earth - school cakes - disguises - petals in the fire. We had put the rose petals in the fire after they put the seeds in the earth, they refused to go in disguise to the shop selling school cakes. It’s the little things hey someone wrote. How was McDonald’s and cream cake and Louise Bourgeois’ 2009 Eugenie Grandet, made just before she died, anything “little”? I was just trying to comprehend size. The way my ass tempted mosquitos - I just wanted a parasol and a turtleneck with mitten sleeves and a paper chandelier and to opt out - the ultraviolence of culture and artists and even poets - even poets - even - were they even - would we ever be even - could I ever get even - could anyone ever get even with me - linen soothed the burns - everything had ended as my fifties got going - Eugenie and the birthday workbox - a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel it’s warmth - apparently an African proverb, they wrote in the Machynlleth WhatsApp - in Machynlleth the “youth” were trashing the beautiful community gardens, including the compost toilet - the ants marauded across the cork - seeds - school cakes - petals -fire - I used to have two huge windows overlooking the trees - the waggon was in the orchard - sickly with burns - thirsty clavicles - hungry bites - the skin I’m in - my head in a grey house hat with flaps - I drew family trees or spider charts of names in my brain - like in The L Word - the brain was a drain like the ass was a vase - the notebook in old rose ended with a longing to take the smelly mystery goosedown duvet - which daughter? - to the launderette - statice - they were called statice - the purple tufts, a bit soot-soot-spritey - Mayazaki hated everything about America and especially New York - the liberation of being anti New York - oh the audacity and the mystery - the chart, it was just called the chart - the goosedown duvet left, musty, in a cupboard and the fresh statice - the almost overpowering fragrance of the tiny sprig of jasmine -all the paper decorations - the chart and the ass - a little wax mouse - three paper hats in a stack - the bitter smoke and the falling blossoms in the lengthening evening, the glitter of the fire in the pinprick holes of the washing machine drum - sparkling water, cream cake and Big Mac - statice for me and peach carnations and baby’s breath for her - were these 90s trends in flowers too - those supermarket rainbow roses dropping their petals for that fire - they were still kids and one pulled out a white claw from a pocket

Note: “my ass is a vase” is a line of Ariana Reines’.

Ruby Reding

What gets exhumed and extracted
like the middle of an ‘o’, the depth at the bottom of ‘u”
petrochemical capital creating indents
and the love of the curve, the deep
analytical extraction into just words

a tool given in kind never felt
that transference
to musical instruments
a gift no better an offering
a splitting, a cutting, the middle.

–

a hole a crack in cement I will tell you the story of cracks and how they were made in the ground at the Greenham Common Dragon Walk. we gathered up matches some hawthorn and aphorisms made noise closed the gulf and produced an offering. in the backdrop of raging cops a green copse a set of corpses were rising to sea level like secrets being deciphered.

we cut the gate felt our gut breathe marching or moving subtly in a pilgrimage yes this was a searching, throwing a coin, a kind of quest if quests can be kind.
on our march we came to a wheel we saw a long hand protruding from its stump, a clump of clay from behind the scenes studio revealed as in magic, this is where I wear my labour like a brooch.

a returning of artefact to country – we walk to reconcile theft, to repair, recuperate and spin in the same clay wheel together. little insects are drowning on the surface of the pond with spun shopping bags in shreds around necks. this was embodied restrictions and we needed glue to stick ourselves back together to stop the extraction.

we are “giving back” yes as a present in your palm. not the single white sailor or saviour edging guilt going out to sea in a plastic bottle with no messages, no meanings. we sought offering without ownership. a cut deepening, we are lost we swim we walk in noxious substances we choke in pollution and there is an offering of Spring. a sprig.

not the kind of false pretence selling self help but an offering to a neighbour, a grandma when the power has gone out and there is no power left in the socket. in 2050 the power really went out but the man power went too. It was a lily in decay and time in a cloud, the end of a fuse going orange and then black. opening a tin of beer we undergo religious awe with the realisation that Greenham Common is now a nature reserve.

seeking a ‘we’ in the dictionary we encounter an impasse / a forced entry. we cut the fence forced back land and into homes/offices. nine raided the offices of Elbit systems, accountability and hope walking into court. smashed windows sought the erasure of symbols, screens and the militaries propped up by UK land. we lined up, banded, thinking the ‘we’ of mourning might awaken the dead and diminish the f/lies.

a period a pause. Up the hill on the pilgrimage and just at that juncture of differentiation we encountered blue liquid - a fertile substance for grass for new life. stickiness here in the wheel. what remains in fossils, bodies, seeds and speech. we speak in flutes and in futurity: from the gut the belly, the tongue, the tip of our throats.

the dragon walk moves / offering
a certain wisdom while questioning the power of the wise guys who always told me stuff.
we seek the middle space between formalism as a blindness and representation as a violence.
a digging deep to understand the grey area, bending our backs into a clay mould blinking, thinking this space is where we stop the extraction.
plastic aint that bad we just slipped into the creamy yoghurt of capital. Like writing a full stop, a perpendicular line that bends into the road, a word that implicates a going into something else, a period of (leaves) reflecting.

Porcelain
by Georgie Platt

Stars aligning
Who’s where’s and what’s
Big designs for some
others for not
High arcing, Big Dipper
Sovereignty guiding…..
& shoals beneath swarming
as They
seep in like sea winds,
imperialist vision
disrupting//
If only
we seen
what was
Abel.
To thee?

Fine white porcelain
White bones
of those
buried deep in the sea
some unearthed
Remembered with antiquity
The others perish in shame
Brown bodies White shame
Brown earth White claim
Terroir terrorists

And sour hearts will tell tales our minds can’t remember
They
(wont)
Be
Human
Enough

Subjectivity will become savagery to out do
& Enclosures will force
The light from the
Dark
& make palaces real

subjects of subjectivity
Enclosed
silenced as savagery
Ivory towers
With fine porcelain
As bones

linger ……..

Ghosts warble with the whale song
Deep in its belly
amongst stolen artefacts
in pretence
of preservation
Great white
Lies.

New Enclosures
bound by screens
& warnings
barbed fences
destination anywhere but here
not needed
and excess cargo loaded
onto flights.

As rivers of blood
Spring fear
Humans become Aliens
& Stolen from Themselves
further and further and farther.

Star gazing becomes Hope
Bewilderment
Repetition
land and resources
no humans
just ruins
brown Earth
glazed White.

The Hammers
by Lennie Varvarides

— The hammers…

I keep coming back to them.

To those hands — those brittle hands — holding up little symbols of hard labour

…holding those hammers up.

Decorated in ribbon and bells — fashion invented just for them —

to dress personality with pride.

The bells ring for work.

The bells ring for it.

The bells ring for work and the hands

— they sing for their supper.

I guess one can understand it — that sense of pride.

Pride in one’s work.

— To work.

— To experience pride for it.

— From it.

— To get pleasure from the dirt — that dirt — the dirt of it.

Hard work makes people stink — stink.

Dirty tropes fill the space — tropes.

— this space of brick — concrete — tile — barbed wire wrapped in net, singing a concert to capitalism; to its imperial lineage.

With the buzz of technology burning a hum in my hand, I roll with the thought that evidence of manual labour is cruel — as cruel as a slow death.

That our image is sold off — just as once our labour was.

It is no longer directed towards hours wasted — but in itself — in essence of itself

— the self —

— that self —

Faceless and reckless and feckless.

As old as…

— as old as work.

As young as youth

— young hands holding toys…once holding toys

Broken now —

Lost or eaten limbs.

— Headless dolls.

— Corpses of play.

Dread is present with humour as it should be

— A bride to it — as intended.

Bride in a net curtain giving birth to miscarriage after miscarriage

— A massacre of Will laid out in neat rows.

The smudge of blood and faeces on those once white tiles — an act of rebellion — while I love the concept; it stinks — it is suffocating — the stench — suffocating…the bell rings

— the bell rings — it rings — do you hear it?

— Death is near.

…The red tape is closing in for all of us.

— Death is here.

— Or am I dead already?

— …am I dead?

— …is this death?

My coffin —

an image imprinted on screen — on metal — on wall painted as coloured shadow — fragile to the touch — formless.

My breath now mixed with sand and gravel and crushed stone.

…I know this because of the hammers.

— They remind me!

Their chime reminds me — it is a blunt excuse for a life

— marking out my path

— predicting my moves with the weight of that wood — with the bang of the metal demanding straight work.

“This is work” it shouts

— “this is work”

— “work” the hammer shouts.

— work!”

Darling

by Seraphina Edelmann

Enclose your hand in mine, darling.
Press your fingertips, flush and tight.

Reading your palm against mine,
Papillary ridges, interpapillary lines,
Our story together, woven and intertwined.
We have built the foundation, our own blueprint,
From the rubble and the ruins.
Our collective collaboration,
Has been anything but light work.
We have had to extract from ourselves,
The stones that burden our hearts.
Built from the ground up,
Creating coils from clay,
Wrapping around like the rings on your fingertips,
We have created our own script, our own language.
Like the concentric circles at the base of the tree,
As time unfolds, we grow together,
Tough like concrete pillars,
Delicate like lace.
Fabricating openwork, hope we don’t slip through the cracks.
If you find yourself frail or faltering, failing to connect,

Reach out to me,
Enclose your hand in mine, darling.

Concrete Paths
by Guadalupe Ferrández

Time ticks and

becomes forgetful.

Seconds pass

while instants fade.

But our days go on.
Automatically.

We just follow.

I put on my headphones and let my thoughts
come
and

go,

along with the beating sounds.

Ideas blossom.

I go.

Right feet forward,

left feet forward.

Right feet forward,

left feet forward.

The concrete paths guide me in the right direction.

Right,

left.
Left,

right.

My phone screen blinks:

someone else has been unfairly killed,
my friend has gone to Crete.

But I just keep on going.
Following the paths:

arid city streets —
shaped in concrete.

And I come across some of the faces
inhabiting them, fleetingly passing by
next to me.

One
after
the
other.

On their own path.

The sound of their stories reverberates
and becomes imprinted in the concrete walls
(the only ones that will remember them).

I just go.

Sidestepping them,
forgetting them.

Unaware.
Imbued with an automatic sense of living.

I tap my card and run down the gloomy stairs.
Losing sight of the shy yet brightening Sun rays —
greeting us today.

And I walk through new concrete paths.

Also automatically.
Also in a rush.

I walk along a lonely (crowded) corridor.
Covered in dust,
lightless,
enclosed with two sad-looking walls.

Filled with thousands of inharmonious faces.
Beating at once.

We all go.

In different directions.

We just go.

In a rush.

My hair is budged by the sharp movements of my flying body.
And my feet, mechanically,
turn

left and

right,
right and

left.

Thoughts keep on coming and going. As well as
new foregone faces:
strangers that I will never see again.

Unmet gazes.

Their murmuring melodies dance in the air.
The brittle sounds of the moving metal blend with them,

cracking from afar.

We all run.
And I just
go.

My phone has no service,
but
the concrete leads me to

where I belong.

And the 2D plastic-boards,
messy combinations of colorful lines and dots,

depict the place.

So
I turn

left:

another corridor,
moodish concrete,
fleeting faces.

I turn
right:

more blinking strangers,
voices,
new grey concrete.

Then,

the sound of a distant trumpet emerges.
It is played by an old man.

He is wearing a tired white T-shirt.
And his face is framed in various unbrushed locks of long white hair.

I remove my headphones
and click pause on my blinking phone screen.

Slowing down, relaxing my body.

The old man smiles.
Our gazes fugaciously meet.
I smile.

Strangers keep on passing.
In a rush.

The trumpet continues. Uninterrupted.
Its melody thumps,
in-between the burbles of the concrete paths:

metallic cracks,

scattered voices,

undying footsteps,

faces unnoticeably coming together.

And a coin clashes with a tattered basket —

resting before the old man’s tired shoes.

Time keeps to unknowingly pass.

Tic-

Tac.
Tic-

Tac.
And so…

I stop
going.

I stop
rushing.

I stop.

And I continue to hear the coin,
clashing.

Over
and over.
Again.

As an echo
in the remoteness of my thoughts.

I stay

there.

Enfolded in the concrete corridor.
Motionless,
among an unceasing wave of faces
who continue chasing their own paths.

Unaware.
Sidestepping me.

Automatically.

I look back at the sign:
an orange thick line with six dots.
It tells me to turn

left.

But
I remain.

There.

Meanwhile,
the old man still plays,
the corridor burbles,
and the murmuring sounds dance.

The metal cracks,
from afar.

And the coin keeps on clashing
(in my mind).

People rush.

I turn around,
walk up the gloomy stairs
and
tap my card.

Leaving them behind.
Letting go.

I look up and greet the shy Sun,
rising above the city’s concrete paths.

Planets and an eclipse
by Dominique Golden

Helen’s head pulls people to an exhibition of material on the subject of her beauty. The

artwork type is a tangle of pulled shadows that hold ancient lines in place. People look

through an undressed window towards ancient Greece. Bending this way and that, fitting

neatly into lines they are making for their-selves. At 4pm a lion’s head fits blindly into a

naked window space, which faces towards ancient Greece, patrons hold their breath in

tangles. Helen pulls their heads to untangle their bended breaths into a long line of string

that fits into perpendicular lengths connecting windows with closed blinds across the hall.

Helen pulls the heads together and the ancient shadows fix onto them.

‘Blinds are the worst type of window blocker as they tangle and bend and look untidy. They are like shoelaces on a child when they don't tie them straight away and the edges array and they cannot thread the ends through the shoe holes because the fray is splayed like a lion head the way my fingers splay to see through blinds. My house doesn’t have blinds but my office used to.’

2 Poems
by Frances Whorrall-Campbell

An Extraordinary Sketch

An extraordinary stretch
erected from protoplasm to stardust
and we jump in the middle.
A forest, dark and no way through.

Backstep:
the passage from here-now is
barred by a thicket of problems
both real and metaphorical,
illuminated by a darkness that
you strike against everything.

You have no idea what you want.
The limits of your imagination are adorably narrow.
A simple shot makes you wobble like jelly
your molecules remembering former engagements
as primordial slurry.
Send you spiralling spine
ward through evolutionary and colonial time,
towards the alchemical, astrological.
Back to the future.

You stumble over your protruding lip.
Beyond, a shadow of a doubt falls across your feet.

You pause.

Against all that evil which levies ludic taxes,
your taxed and trained mind strains
to apprehend
noon on a hot day.
Charred light in every region of the eyeball:
the mouth of Hell is white,
not black.

There is no threshold, nevertheless you cross it clumsily,
a reticent trickle of body-liquid.
Cruciform bar and kneeling in the
atmospheric under-pressure, you wait.
And presently, warming the seat beside you,
a man exists.

And fear alleviates.

He is beautiful.
Like thunder,
a column of solid noise in the blind flambé.
You know him through his particular heat, his odour:
your Virgil.
He speaks and his dear voice is plutonic,
moving to your ear like a pigeon
coming home.
In the time it takes for clouds to gather and
hide his conical shape
you will have leapt up and gone.
You have followed him and will now again.

Washed into a pecuniary blankness by this echolaliac’s
purple tongue, all self-ish property
deserts you.
A man you want, no man is he –
an identity, or the desire to be
produced by a second sacking, this time
of his/story.
Older, literary man seeks same
for trip of a lifetime.

What are you? Barely restrained shade.
Is it possible,
that his legendary being is enough
to transpierce the massive fault of your exile?

Virgil puts a record on

and the needle skates.

His virtue is iridescent
like vapour off a car bonnet
you agree enthusiastically
phlegm in your chest cauls over
uh a possibility
tucking it away
bringing it out

all your softness turns to rubble.
Florence is the new Sodom,
they tossed you on an iron griddle
made you the focus of an insane battle.
You induced yourself with a ginger tisane,
taking shape in the mercurial alluvium
of a pearl earring.
Rakish tonic
for your split personality:
flirtation with the bastard T.

Virgil intercedes with all the subtlety
of a virgin.
He coughs, announcing:
Son,
I’m taking you to hell.
Gelatinous horror coats your bowels
but he continues, unphased
by your retching. How else do you think
you’ll become a man?
Do you suppose Orpheus went willingly?
Just as you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince,
you’ve got to meet a lot of devils to know
what kind of guy you need to be.
And get the girl too
in case you need more incentives.

Heavy as a stone, you are a globe
turned upside down by this promise.
Its premise: to give you a whole new acculturation,
speed-run your proper adolescence,
is tempting even at this price.
So, despite the better angels of your judgement,
across the threshold of your lips
pass the words
take me dad
as your feet make similar forward steps
behind your teacher.

Baudelaire

What did Baudelaire prescribe to cure the alienation of modernity? It certainly wasn’t synthetic testosterone. We have no tradition. Perhaps we have a history, this is true, but history and tradition are two different things. A friend said that the queer desire for history is actually a desire for queer to be produced by history. To go back over the non-modern, non-white, non-western, gender non-binary and use them to produce the very things we sit them against. We look back over our shoulders and say ‘we too have never been colonisers’, failing to recognise how we have converted the ‘not’ to the ‘is’ in exactly the same way. We believe the past is a window not a white corridor filled with mirrors. Look at all the ways history has been written on my body. Here, here, and here. I invite you to read the phrases while I cross my inky fingers behind my back. I am suspicious of History with its flashes and ceremony. You warned me not to accept their ribbons, to look twice at the hands that sent them over. You wore an NHS t-shirt and didn’t speak but the words on your chest told of a battle we had no hope of winning. I felt my face being tattooed with such ferocity that I forced myself to meet your eyes and I knew I was imploring you to make it stop. That old Oedipal tragedy, now with an added sequel. How to be filial without fucking (it up)? I’ve been thinking about the difference between moment of happiness and structures that sustain happiness. A grammar of happiness: a whole revolutionary tense. I listen but I don’t learn even though there’s so much to be learnt from the fact that ancestors were stolen even if they weren’t mine. I don’t have precise enough tools to dissect it, all of those available have been blunted with repeated use. But how will you know a weapon is effective if it is not bloodstained? Kill your father, kill your darlings: clichés tacky with sanguineous residue. Every sign is a sign of life.

Water Source by Margaret Jennings

Water as thoughts
Life force flows through
Holdout hands to catch a few drops

Piped and
Trickling down drain
Now where does it return to…

Flowing through bodies
To rivers to oceans
On earth with it
On earth without it

In the park
Serge along pathways
Muddy footprints squelch

Sipping a cup of tea
Thoughts abound
Quietly through channels

Sun through window
Happy morning sigh
Dry houseplants droop

Mountain Spring Water by Jun Koya

I was brought up
in a beautiful mountain place.

My village people used mountain spring water
To cultivate rice, vegetables and fruit trees.

I loved drinking spring water
First thing in the morning

Looking at mountains
I spoke to them
I spoke to them
With a big smile

Everything happened as a child
And everything was taken for granted

However and however
I can’t live without spring water
Saying thank you

About the Writers

Suzanna Slack wishes to abolish the bio. They write memory trilogies as an adventure before dementia. The Poor Children, Is This It? and The Shedding (VF Press) are available via the internet and in bookshops.

Ruby Reding (b. 1995) is a writer and artist living in South London. Her projects have been shown internationally in galleries, publications and residencies including at TACO!, SÎM Gallery, Konstepidemin, Word For/Word Journal and Tears in the Fence.

Georgia Platt is an English writer living in London. Born in 1980, she lived in West Dorset before returning to London. She studied English and Creative writing at Birkbeck University, London. Her work focuses on human nature, family relationships and mental health issues.

An award-winning writer and director, Lennie Varvarides is a first generation Cypriot, born in London to immigrant parents and brought up in the rag trade. Lennie studied Visual Arts at UAL and has an MA in Writing for Performance from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. As an Award-Winning Filmmaker, Lennie is the Founder and Creative Producer of DYSPLA, a studio producing the work of Neurodivergent Storymakers.

Seraphina Edelmann is a poet and writer based in London. She has been working on a project called, 'What's for Dinner?' which explores several different themes in relation to food through art and writing. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @seraphinaoriana

Guadalupe Ferrández is a graduate of the BA Fashion Business programme at Istituto Marangoni (Paris), awarded by Manchester Metropolitan University. She has several years of experience working in the Fashion Industry and exploring different roles, especially in Fashion Media. She is currently taking an MA in Culture Industry in Goldsmiths University of London. She is particularly interested in the communicative role of culture (the ability to produce/reproduce and spread messages embedded in different forms, and the process to do so) and the blending of creative disciplines (the multidisciplinary potential of cultural production) to create new experiences (in both, print/physical and digital spaces).

Dominique Golden was raised in St Helens and has been London based since her early twenties. She works as a mixed media and multidisciplinary arts practitioner. Dominique studied fine art at The Royal College of Art from 1995 - 1997. She now works with performative sound art and spoken word as well experimental film and installation. In 2021 she received an ACE grant to produce an experimental film about Julian of Norwich and the influence of her thirteen-century pros on a modern-day audience. Exhibitions and performances include; Late at Tate, The Whitechapel Gallery, BACKLIT Gallery (Notts) and The Walthamstow Garden Party.

Francis Whorrall-Campbell (b.1995) is an artist, researcher and writer from the UK. Under the guidance of their own transness, they experiment with questions of bodily authority, knowledge and possibility to produce artwork and texts in various media and formats.

Margaret Jennings is an environmental activist, award-winning artist, and graduate of the BA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently exploring using poetic form in workshops at Eco Haven centred on the intersections between ecology and activism.

Jun Koya is a Japanese artist studying at Goldsmiths, University of London. His main influences are the Japanese Haiku poet Bashu, Rosa Luxemburg, and Zen philosophy.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.

the 87 press

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