Happy Hump Day! I hope everyone is having a good week so far, well, as good as you can in this world we’re living in. As a wee treat I’ll be sharing more than one poem/poet this evening. Each is a favourite of mine and I hope you enjoy them too.
To begin with we have two poems from Briony Hughes’ collection Dorothy (2020) published by Broken Sleep Books. “Dorothy is a collection of ‘via’ poems that conveys stories of numberless nameless forgotten women who lived, worked, and died by the river Thames and its tributaries” (Nisha Ramayya 2020). This collection not only contains powerful poetry but is also stunning visually and the “visceral diagrammatic and hand drawn shapes connect the structural properties of water to the female body of the poet” (Cat Chong 2020). You can purchase a copy of Dorothy from Broken Sleep Books here.
via film
old father thames will lose
none of his dignity
through
the arrival of this
newcomer
this lusty child of a new
age
Dorothy is
ankle tied
to cement
blocks it
will take 73
years
to t t tt
resurface
via bath
globular-bulbous as canopy reclines into rosemary
she’s shifting against plastic chewed by bodies froth
and hard water as tangerine into hips slip this breasted retiform brims
thickens skim under the tap swells across
hot – furrows and fissures in both
elongated fruit directions an exchange of
display your tentacles and tube feet! ripening
rub ginger and active tar against your leather bark clots at the plug
scalp sifting flickers of white her foliage reaching across
a tiled floor
References
Hughes, B. (2020) Dorothy. Cornwall/Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 18 & 24
~The H Word~ by Hazel Urquhart 
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