Introducing The October 2009 Readers - 3. Eddie Gibbons

Eddie Gibbons is more Ryanair than Debonair. And he can prove it.


How It Will Be

You will think of her
less and less,
although you’ll think
no less of her.

These thoughts, though few,
remain the strongest.
What you lose
stays with you longest.

Introducing The October 2009 Readers - 2. Dave Coates

Dave Coates grew up in Belfast before moving to York for his English Lit undergrad, and has lived in Edinburgh for just over a year. He is part of the editing team for Read This Magazine, runs a poetry night at The Bowery aimed at new/emerging writers, and earlier this year had a chapbook published by The Forest called Cover Story. He blogs at The Not Brazilian Blog.


Afters

This is a cupcake, not a muffin,
muffins have no icing – this has enough in

to make a grown man saccharine, or at least
a more excitable beast. This palm-spanning feast

of heavy cream, shortening, sugar and butter
and eggs and god-knows-what has me shudder-

ing across the line where words begin to falter,
where desire holds sway. The glisteny way the water-

lily-white frosting is bursting with the lush
insistence, here I am, its brush-

stroked largess and malleable lines
looming beyond its papery confines

and stippling, drippling from your skin-bare
wrists, enlarge your curlicue smile as you declare

here you are.

Introducing The October 2009 Readers - 1. Brian Johnstone

Brian Johnstone has published two poetry collections and two pamphlets; his second full collection The Book of Belongings was published by Arc in August 2009. His work has appeared throughout the UK, in America and in various European countries. His poems 'evoke...a sense of spiritual immanence in their slow still spaces' (Scottish Literary Journal); several have been translated into Catalan, Swedish, Slovakian & Lithuanian, and published in the respective countries. In 2009 Terra Incognita, a small collection of his poems in Italian translation, was published by L’Officina (Vicenza). Brian Johnstone is the poet member of Trio Verso, a collaboration with saxophonist Richard Ingham and bassist Louise Major, dedicated to presenting live poetry and improvised jazz-inflected soundscapes. He is co-founder and currently Festival Director of StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

Script

He'd tie them by their necks
with binder twine
his father slipped him from the shed,

watch mouse flesh stiffen, give up
what he knew of life
suspended from the fence: each skeleton

a minuscule perfection.
And later, with the rats,
whose worm-grooved tails a half-inch tack

fixed limp outside the byre,
he'd study transformation, till each
tined incisor grinned.

In growing up with vermin - weasels, stoats
and more - he'd learned them all
the hard way, strung up on a wire:

the thieves that flanked the killing ground
of Christ, the hoodie crow
they'd pinned spread-eagled on a rail

and planted in the margins of the yard.
There worms diced
meat and muscle for his robes,

the alpha and the omega,
each quill a black and feathered script,
his writing on the wall.