About Text Size: larger | normal | smaller
Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems and pictures. We pair poets with poets and photographers with photographers. Each pair produces a sequence of new works responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry and photography to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice in a wide range of places. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here, look at photographs here.
 

Part VI: Brighton 1938

(Extracted from the series “The Phoney War”)


1.

She thinks of England
and he is a tiger.  The receiver is hung again

carefully: a small click
that neither can hear.

Her less purposeful clicks resound
down the pavement.

He desires to lick off the lines she has drawn
in black pen
down the backs of her legs.

 

2.
In the telegram office
they know. They know.
Two lipstick smiles: I‘m sorry
but we have no record of that abode.

He remembers her
clicking her purse, head high;
the message gone unsent

and is humbled. She
ponders only on the holy rage
of Man.

There is a child (not his).

 

3.
She says they will come in a blacked-out van
in the night. Which he thinks
is too obvious.

In the mornings she sticks his ridiculous gum
in the ashtray

and brushes her hair
while she mutters

…I told you so much
of myself.