2022 Micro Commissions

Chris Singleton – Long After They Pass

Chris Singleton is a spoken word/theatre artist from Leeds and the Artistic Director of Brave Words. He held the position of Ilkley Literature Festival’s Apprentice Poet in Residence in 2023.

His debut show How To Be A Better Human was shortlisted for two Saboteur awards.

Long After They Pass 

When you cross paths with a stranger
the air spirographs the remnant of their scent
paints pictures with a palate of pheromones and
fragrance, your soul senses the legacy of
memories you thought you’d forgotten.

It could take you anywhere, this elderly empathy:
to the pungent perfume of a post-pub pubescent fumble,
to your graffitied school desk, teacher’s halitosis lingering long after they pass,
to sneaky guinnels where your friend blends locker room deodorant with secret smoker’s stench.

Or maybe it takes you to a time unstained by the mundane,
ancient streets where you once stumbled late-night Olympics
floodlit by supermoon skies; felt the demise of summer
as the clouds shed sloppy kisses to soak the pair of you,
sprinting for shelter, palms held over the top of cheap plastic wine,
and you know even as you give chase that one of you won’t make it,
your feet splashing in their trailing scent, they look over a shoulder,
and the smile they wear seems infinite-

Warm rain, pavement, today.
The stranger who did nothing but cross your path
wearing eau de l’histoire, remains oblivious to your reminiscence
tattoos the beat of their feet on the street a steady retreat replete
with an echo in your thoughts, played on repeat:
you were there, you were there, you were there.

Claire Lynn – Sixteen Summers

Claire Lynn teaches Creative Writing around Northumberland.

Her poems have been placed in various competitions including the Bridport Prize and published in numerous anthologies and magazines such as Butcher’s Dog.

Sixteen Summers

Yes, I’ll remember Tonfanau: its single line
of track and solitary platform, brambles
and cow parsley tangling the fence.
Through weighted gates, we’d shepherd

our small children across the rails
towards the beach.  The path skirts
a clutch of broken-down cottages
being re-built stone by stone,

advancing, from one summer to the next,
by only a gable end.  The grudging sheep
rise at the last moment to let us pass.
The wind casts a rippling net of sunlight

where sanderlings skitter at the edge
of the sea.  At last I sit, cooling my feet
in a rock pool. A cormorant flies past –
a black cross in the sky.  It’s too hot

not to be in the water but my children
are digging moats in the sand.  A wave
surges up the channel, divides
and encircles their castle.

Sixteen summers here, and still
we strive to hold back the tide,
reinforcing sand with seaweed,
patting with plastic spades.

I think of Fairbourne – two stops
up the line – the village awaiting
decommissioning as sea levels rise.
The estuary will swallow it.

When the waves have covered
the sand, we retreat to the stones,
watch a flock of terns reclaim
the air in swirls, flexing the blades

of their wings as they dive
into shallows where the sea
has smoothed away our footprints.
Today will be the hottest day

since records began.  Coldest summer
of the rest of our lives, says my daughter.
We head back inland, our pockets
heavy with looted shells.

Daniel Hinds – The Last Animal

Daniel Hinds won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize in 2018.

His poetry has been published by BBC Sounds, The London Magazine, Southword, The New European, and elsewhere.

The Last Animal

‘I will not live among the wild scenes of nature’
– Mary Shelley, The Last Man

When all the other animals are dead
The last primate stands on the shore

A steel fish net curled between his knuckles.
His toe claws the wet mush, leaving furrows

Like the rusted automated tractors churning
With the enduring determineless determination

Of the machine’s complex simplicity.
They will batter the earth as long as their batteries last.

He casts his net and collects the permanent bric-a-brac.
He does so from day into Byronic darkness.

He squirms the worm of his tongue into shells
And holds the spittled cockle to his ears.

There are no howling demons left to fear;
No gods to give black jackal or wicked panther godheads.

The black stripes of tigers consumed the white
And orange flame; gone as the need

For fireside, huddle, and cave.
And what lives are the oldest dead;

The plastic dinosaurs of the permanent amusement park
Further down the pier.

Beneath their outstretched moonlit sickle shapes
The only swallows are the bites of frost.

He pulls his final teeth. His bones will outlast
His hunger, and feed the invisible.

The new Adam, with nothing left to name.

Emma Conally-Barklem – Mágoa

Emma Conally-Barklem is a yoga teacher, writer and poet based in Yorkshire.

Mágoa

I washed up today on the shore of your handbag
Two purses
One for everyday use
One for holidays and days out
Receipt for our Afternoon Tea, January 2018
Train ticket to York for a hotel stay.

Picked up your glasses
The glass fell out
I was incensed, as if someone had poked a finger in your eye
Hair (synthetic) in a zipped freezer bag (undated)

60 Euros for Portugal, Bureau de Exchange receipt, folded and faded.
I scale for skin cells.

Hold glasses delicately aloft
Glint in the weak October sunlight,
I spy                          fingerprints
Whorls of unique truth
Semaphore of a being, irreplaceable, no fingers exist
But here you are offering me Monopoly money when I can’t travel

Though, I think of boarding a ‘plane where my name is my only currency and the meteor clump of molten ache will be hand luggage (undeclared)
An M&S lipstick (unused)
Pencil written list:
Aprons, bread, toothbrush (underlined), Fairy (Liquid not sprite)

I sit now, on the kitchen windowsill
Clear away the unidentified herb plant carcass that still remains
The grubby leavings you’d have cleared.
Perch above as you wash dishes, absent-minded

We can sit (simultaneously)
I can hand you your handbag of
Purses, photos, receipts, glasses, lipstick, list, a pen saying ‘Sister’, tickets, mobile phone (dead), driving license, store cards, coach card, Emergency Care card, Gold Line patient card

Minus the last two
As if they didn’t exist

Just the usual mum stuff in this battered bag
So you can look indignant, wondering how it ended up in my hands
Why I look so lined, broken, now relieved, grateful
Knowing as you gather me in for a casual cuddle (though for me it’s been so long)
I’ll have to hold back, act normal, hold on to you and this illusion lest the bag is all that remains.

Holly Bars – Body, The Things I Have Done 

Holly Bars’ poems have been published by The Moth, Ink, Sweat & Tear, Fragmented Voices, Porridge, Visual Verse, Anti-Heroin Chic, Runcible Spoon and more. Her debut collection Dirty was published by Yaffle Press.

Body, The Things I Have Done

Joe Williams – Handwritten

Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet from Leeds. His work has appeared in The North, Popshot, Prole, Strix, Poetry Scotland and The Blue Nib, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. His latest anthology The Taking Part was published by Maytree Press in 2021.

Handwritten

I have letters, dozens of them,
a boxful I’ve carried round
for twenty, thirty years,
from one home to another,
still in their envelopes,
a chronicle of old addresses,
family home to Brudenell Road,
Ashville Avenue, Church Street.

Now it’s time to move again,
and they’re not coming with me.

I’m reading them one last time,
the first time in years,
before they get consigned
to Tuesday’s bins, for recycling
into cardboard or toilet roll,
these handwritten stories
from a half-remembered past.

There’s news of partners lost and found,
favourite new albums, gigs,
lines cribbed from Vic and Bob,
always an item enclosed, from Steve,
a drawing of me in a car, by Anna,
hoping I’d passed my test.
I don’t know if that was the time I did
or one of the three I failed.

There’s Maddy, my teenage pen pal.
It’s decades since I thought of her
or her letters, all coloured ink
and smiley faces, marginalia
scrawled by friends as bored as her
in afternoon physics.
I didn’t realise at the time
that boarding at St Swithun’s and
her Mum buying a King’s Road flat
meant she must have been loaded.

There’s John, who always wanted people
to call him Jerry. No one did.
He always sent a Christmas card,
care of my parents, long after this.
I never got round to replying
before they eventually stopped.

Those were my lost years,
the days I let things fall away.

The letters end in ’98,
the year the world went digital.
No need, then, for ink or stamps,
but still, more of these letters than not
are from people I’m not in touch with,
others little more than a name
on a list on a social media page.
I wonder how many of them have been
hoarding the past, like me.

I’m never the one to make the effort.
I’ve always been better at walking away.

Kitty Donnelly – Clearances

first collection The Impact of Limited Time was the joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition. Her second collection In Dangerous Hours was published in 2022.

Clearances

Keys in hand, permission to remove
the treasures of a spent life,
I’ve found watches beneath mattresses,
straps pierced for thinning wrists,
christening slippers crushed like moths,
their satin fading in a box from white
to grey to colourless.

Dead-brand jars, cans of pet food,
rusty rimmed, travel brochures
browsed by hopeful fingers,
a hand-carved dolls house wired to light
the bedroom of a long-grown child.

Each new clearance, I return to my father’s
flat: his absence in the attic,
the sun-projected particles that swirl
from sheafs of statements, telling,
in debits, of childhood outings;
those day-per-page diaries, their preludes
to my birth; the vial of Valium dust
he kept for years to symbolise
the shackles of dependence.

Every card I ever made:
felt pen mermaids, hearts above
my best joined-up – final moments
with the remnants of a bagged existence
bound for a charity shop. There is
no more than this lone sliver of allotted time,
what we leave behind us.

Natalie Anastasia Davies – The Edge of Morning

Natalie Anastasia Davies is a versatile performance poet, facilitator, and community worker of Caribbean descent. She has performed for Apples and Snakes, Extinction Rebellion and Black Voices Matter, and she facilitates a weekly workshop named People Poetry with award-winning arts organisation Space2.

The Edge of Morning

I look into my ageing waters.
And do not quite recognise myself,
in their reflection.

I am haunted by receding shorelines
I smooth over wrinkled seas,
scrape back storm-felled trees,
into handfuls of forest.

In the bedrock of our home, I watch you sleep.
A question echoes about my core
‘What binds us, in this crater of union?’
Each craven promise, depletes me.

I live in hope, but each sunrise brings,
a shoal of foreign bodies, washed up on my shores.
I have realised, they are the ghosts of you.
Once sated, you roam feckless.

In our peak, we were ageless.
Boasting essence of fig and honey-soaked skies.
Our soils, were the remnants of stars.
We nestled, in the hot springs of our youth.

These days, I am scorched earth,
masked by, burnt orange horizons.
I am a tearless cry, simmering into bitter seasons.
We lay ashen; pining for the touch of sylvan shelter.

In tender moments, I remember you.
Only human. Wish to savour early notes, of nectar.
But a wanton scent etches, at our bed once shared.

Now, we are coasting
towards the glacial edge of morning.
I feel you, like time, ticking under my skin.

Everything, is surfacing.
And I am thinking, of leaving you
before you wake.