It’s all in the wrists
all in the waking
the morning break, of eggshells
on a frying pan lip
golden yolk perfectly round
at the centre of everything.
We are not caught
by the tug of bedsheets
no fishing shards
from burnt out hours.
We’re almost halfway through June. How did that happen?
The month kicked off with a poetry at the Button Warehouse. (Normally hosted by Joy Winkler but covered this month by John Lindley). Angela Topping was guest poet, and gave fantastic readings at the start of each half from her various collections. Then the evening was turned over to the open mic, and I ended up closing the evening out with ‘Legs Eleven’ from my collection ‘It’s All In The Blood’. This was probably my favourite performance of the year so far as the atmosphere was fantastic, I made it through the poem without stumbling, and even sold a copy of my book.
This trail of fingerprints is simply browsing. Palm pressed to the hollow of your spine before you step out of the moment, leave this touch behind you in that second where electric ran your length and cracked between your ribs as something begins burning.
I’ve combined by love of sketching and poetry to make some poem postcards for ‘The Muse Spits Blood’. They turned out rather nicely, so I think I might have to make some more postcards for the other quadrilles I have written over the past few years.
Temper your tongue with candyfloss static. Electric the bite is enough to ward off words, stop them before the starting gates in the narrow space between crowded molars. Use teeth to smile around calorie free pleasantries. Taste patience becoming poison. Every syllable sharp. Bitter.
I’ve started recoding some of my poems and posting them to Tick-Tock. (@caroljforrester) Short and sweet work best, so I’m looking to a lot of my quadrilles as a starting point, and trying very hard not to self-sabotage with worries over how awful I feel I sound in recordings.
My Body Is Like An Envelope I have the watermarks from when you steamed my secrets loose from my skin. Boiling, I felt every inch of you tremble, kettle-like, mouth a tight scream of a spout shrilling for attention, for answers. You left me unstuck, spilling words addressed to someone else. No one held your tongue accountable, only mine, here see where I taped down the tears the places that no longer seal.
Perhaps surprisingly, I always find the harder prompts to be the ones where I’ve done something similar before. I have a poem ready to send out for submission that works an extended simile/metaphor of a shipwreck throughout the whole piece. It can be easy to almost write the same poem again if it fits to the prompt, and I had to go off for a little think before I found a way to work around the old poem still lurking in my head.
Carol J Forrester 
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