Limbic by Peter Scalpello

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Reading Peter Scalpello in issue 1 of Fourteen Poems was one of the main reasons I have now spent most of the last few years reading queer poetry, he gets it so right, gives voices to things I didn’t know we were allowed to say out loud.

Many of the poems ache with the conflicted nature of life, sex enjoyed while at the same time being toxic, feeling of self-worth misplaced, feelings of guilt.

The opening poem “After Us” set the tone, and brings a tear to the eye...

Wound by Richard Scott

I read Richard Scott’s Soho a couple of years ago, and earlier pamphlet has that same holding of sex openly alongside the whole of life – to talk about being gay without talking about the sex is not to tell truth. There is also religious imagery within the poems that connects for me.

In the blurb it says Richard was born in 1981, which surprises me, it felt like he is writing from a slightly older generation of gay experience than my own.

Test

That’s my son’s birthday

and before she can readjust her face

I catch pity.

I am being asked the inevitable questions:

age, how many lovers, were they from the EU -

thing I tell her, more or less.

She boozes up my elbow bend,

unpeels a fresh bright needle.

I look away to see

the wall with its proud bubble writing

RAINBOW WARRIORS FACING IT TOGETHER

and a pamphlet advertising chastity.

We were careful though

I offer as an apology.

Her syringe begrudgingly fill, splutters,

she draws out leaving a bead of guilty blood

on the crook of my arm.

You’ll know in three hours darling, for better or worse.

Gongoozler by Joshua Judson

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There is such tenderness in these poems, as they think about their Grandparents dementia – sincere without being twee – honest in seeing aging.

Stargazing and Constellations by Astra Papachristodoulou

 Stargazing   Constellations  

In both Stargazing and in Constellations the poems feel like fragments, jewel like fragments.

Stargazing draws on imagery from Greek myths.

In Constellations the words are placed around a constellation, which allows you to encounter them in a “suggested” order or to navigation your on way around them.

Clouds Cannot Cover Us by Jay Hulme

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One of the poems…

The Meaning of Stories

Perhaps it is true that none of my heroes exist,

summed up on a list entitled “fictional characters”.

My life lessons come from the mouths

of people paid to pretend they are

someone they are not,

but I can’t forget what they have taught me.

Because when words mean something,

they stay,

no matter where they came from.

So who cares if I live my life by a line

issued from the mouth of Gandalf the Grey,

on a film set,

it doesn’t mean it’s worth less than something

said by someone who actually existed.

Because attribution is overshadowed by meaning,

and the fact that these words stay with me

means more than the circumstances

under which they were uttered.

So if fiction it the foundation

on which I build my life, I can promise you

that my turrets will reach the sky,

before yours reach my dungeons.

Because fiction holds within it

the promise of a better world;

and I believe,

not just because I can,

but because I have to.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

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As with Real Life these are intense stories.

Some are contained in a single chapters, others return across a number of chapters. Although not explicitly linked they are certainly more than the sum of the parts.

Questions of identity, of struggles to be yourself in the world, about the performances we are expected to give those around us seemingly to make them comfortable, are the core of the stories.

There is a darkness, there are not “happy ever afters” offered, but a persistence of being – we go on with the struggle.

Nothing is Okay by Rachel Wiley

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These are powerful poems about learning to be okay within your body…

From the poem Belly Kisses

…

and vowed that I would not let another person inside me

that hasn’t seen me fully…

a promise I break every time the need to be touched

outweighs the need for dignity.

I am still learning how to ask for what I deserve without it

also sounding like an apology.

…

Settle

So maybe one day I’ll just settle

in a pastel senior citizens’ home

my life reduced to what can fit onto a dresser top,

a lift raft.

Some nice man and I will bond over the side effects of

our blood pressure pills

and then just settle in together like ribs after a deep sigh.

He will absent-mindedly call me by his dead wife’s name.

I will turn down my hearing aids.

He will have the best hard candies in the whole joint.

I will quietly hope to die first so as not to be left again.

His children will politely hate me,

bringing nice though impersonal gifts at Christmas.

It’ll be fine.

Just fine.

The Human Body is A Hive by Erica Gillingham

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The poems about creating a queer family are so affirming, even in the challenges.

One of the poems …

Let’s Make a Baby With Science

We can’t fuck our way to a family

so let’s do the furthest thing possible

from the intimacy of our bedroom.

Let’s invite a dozen medical professionals

to ask us invasive questions with varying

degrees of empathy & bedside manner.

Let’s test my veins, my blood, my uterus,

my textbook ovaries until we lose track

of our week-on-week appointments.

Let’s find ourselves speechless after each shot,

not knowing how to respond to each other,

syringes empty, sharp’s box lying at our feet.

Let’s turn down invitations to all-night discos,

weekend benders & sweaty basement raves

because we’ve got at-home stimulants to do.

Let’s call the process a cycle, as if it natural,

then spend two weeks worrying about having

enough piss in my bladder for the pregnancy test.

And when it doesn’t work, think it should work,

we won’t know why, may never know why,

then we’ll do it all over again. And again.

The Glamour Boys by Chris Bryant

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The decadent interwar lives of this group of privileged gay and bisexual men promotes mixed feelings – their lives are in certain ways constrained but their money (or that of their friends) allows them to spend time in the relative freedom of Berlin and to keep scandal at bay in ways that their working class contemporaries simply could not.

But Chris Bryant shows how their marginal status, albeit within “the Establishment”, and their first hand experiences of the rise of the Nazis placed them in a position to stand up and push for Great Britain to defend freedoms when so many around them seemed blind to the threat. It is sickening how compromised and complicit large sections of the British ruling elite were with the Nazis, even well into the War itself.

Some of them saw active service, and for some it seems there was a desire, alongside the needs of the Country, to take the opportunity to claim the “manly” identity of solider in contrast to the stigma of being “effeminate” which was at this point interchangeable with being gay.

As the narrative unfolds, Bryant keeps us engaged and one has ever increasing respect for those would put doing the right thing ahead of reputation or personal safety. It runs in a strong contrast to much of what we see from our politicians today...