Spelt Poetry Competition

Th Spelt Poetry Competition 2023 opens 1st April 2023.

Open date: 1st April 2023

Closing date: 31st July 2023

The Spelt Poetry Competition is a competition for rural themed poems. What do we mean by that? We are looking for poems that show how people interact with nature, whether that is in a rural environment, an urban environment, a garden, a park, a mountain, a lake…it is open to interpretation. We want to see poems that show what nature writing can be, how the skill of a poet can transport a reader. We are looking out for poems that are innovative and interesting, that use the skills in the poets toolbox to maximum advantage.

This year’s judge is Jane Burn. Jane Burn is a working class, pansexual, autistic person, poet, artist and essayist, who lives with her family in an off-grid rural community for eight months of the year. Places in which her essays have appeared include the Rebecca Swift Foundation, Persona Journal, The Friday Poem and The Alchemy Spoon. Since 2014, Jane’s poems have won, been placed, shortlisted, or longlisted in seventy competitions. Her poems are widely published, in magazines such as The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog and Poetry London, as well as being anthologised by presses including Seren, Arachne Press, Broken Sleep and Macmillan. Jane has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University, where she was awarded the 2022 academic prize for best overall performance. In 2022, Jane explored her neurodivergent writer’s thoughts and theories funded by Arts Council England and is currently putting these ideas into a book. In 2023 she was awarded a grant by the Royal Literary Fund. Jane is currently part of the Wonky Animals Poetry Collective. Her pamphlets and collections have been published by Indigo Dreams, Wyrd Harvest, KFS Press, Talking Pen and BLERoom Press. Her latest collection, Be Feared, is available from Nine Arches. She hosts workshops both in person and online.

Jane had this to say about what she was looking for:

The rural experiece is difficult to define – where does rurality begin or end? What about the grey areas between? I am hoping to read poems that defy homegeneity – poems which capture how multi-faceted rural themes can be. I am interested in reading where the human either fits or does not fit into such interesting, elusive landscapes, I am interested in what can be discovered there. I am hoping to read poems which suprise in there way they take flight – all brilliant poems take flight somehow; take the senses and the mind to unexpected places.

Prizes:

First: £300 plus publication in Spelt magazine

Second: £200 plus publication in Spelt Magazine

Third: £100 plus publication in Spelt Magazine

Entry Fee: £10 for up to three poems

Rules

The competition is open to poets from anywhere in the world.
Poems must be the entrant’s own work and not previously published anywhere, either in print or online, including on personal blogs and social media pages.
All poems must be in English.
All poems must be typed; no handwritten entries will be accepted.
All poems must be forty lines or less. This does not include titles or stanza breaks.
Entry is online only and must be sent as a word document attachment, with each poem on a separate page of that attachment.
the poets name must not appear on the entry document.
All poems within the entry must be sent at the same time.
Each poem should have a title.
The name of the attached file should be the title of the first poem in the attached document.
You may enter up to three poems per £10 entry fee.
You may enter the competition as many times as you wish, as long as the £10 entry fee is paid each time.
Entry fees are non-refundable.
Work will not be returned. Please ensure you keep a copy.
We are unable to give feedback.
Simultaneous submissions are NOT accepted. All poems in an entry will be disqualified if found to be sent in a simultaneous submission.
All entries will be notified of the result by 1st September 2023, winners will be announced publicly through this website and on social media soon after.
The entry fee is £10 for up to three poems.
Closing date for this competition is midnight, UK time, on 31^st July 2023

How to Enter:

Use the payment button below to pay for your entry
Attach your poems in one word document, making sure your name is no where on the document.
Email your entry to speltmagazine@gmail.com with COMPETITION in the subject line.
Include in the body of the email your name and address, asPayPal payment reference, title/s of your poem/s.

Previous Winners

Spelt Poetry Competition 2022

We had an incredible response to the competition this year with 690 individual poems submitted. I know Polly had an incredibly difficult job whittling down to a long list of just 30 poems, and then to a short list of just 10 poems.

Here’s what this year’s judge, Polly Atkin had to say:

Rural poetry is alive and thriving. Anyone reading the entries to this competition could not deny it. I read poems that celebrated rural landscapes and poems that lamented the loss of ecosystems and livelihoods. There were many poems about the felling or falling of trees, of the loss of farms and farmland, the loss of people, of grief of many kinds. There were many poems centred on our nonhuman companions, poems that brought animals and birds to life on the page and in my head. There were poems that reflected the difficulties of rural life, now and in the past, and poems that revelled in immersion in the natural world. There were poems that took formal risks, poems that gloried in languages and dialects, and some brilliant quiet, imagist poems that conjured places and moments in only a few lines.

Whatever you think of prize culture in poetry, whilst we live within it, we have to acknowledge the power of a prize to change a poet’s life. There are two things many poets are perennially short of: money and confidence in their own work. Winning a prize can mean the difference between carrying on with a writing project or shelving it, from keeping writing to giving up, from paying bills or the electric shutting off. This affects some communities disproportionately to others, amplified for anyone already marginalised, whether because of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, class, income or geography. Whenever I am judging a competition, I have this in my mind.

It makes it all the more difficult when, as with the Spelt Poetry Prize this year, the entries are of such an overwhelming high standard. Everyone who submitted should be pleased with their work. I was, reading it. It was a pleasure and then a pain reading the almost 700 entries, because I knew I would be setting aside hundreds of moving and effective poems. Please do not feel disheartened if you did not make the longlist. All of you should keep writing, keep submitting. I know this is not always helpful to read, but I really do mean it. Whittling my long-longlist of over 100 poems down to the longlist of 30 was like shutting friends out in the cold. Those that remained not only approached their subjects in unusual, persuasive, and often witty ways, but changed the way I look at the world around me. To me, this is a sign a poem is really working on me. The shortlist and winners are those that had their own singular characters and ways of looking at the world which I could not get out of my head.

The third prize-winner ‘Roadkill’ struck me immediately with its rural gothic lens on interpersonal violence, grounded in the specificities of the setting. It’s an alarming poem, but one I could not unhook from my throat. The sense of dread and threat throughout is palpable and powerful.

The second prize-winner ‘Strange Fruit’ similarly struck me with its command of tone and voice, from that striking first line onwards. It balances lush description with rhetorical control, and takes the reader into the world of its language and landscape, of the relationship between places and cultures and between mother and child.

The first prize-winner ‘The Hospital Is Not My House’ folds the landscape of a hospital – ‘not a place for geography’ – into a rural landscape the girl is removed from – the ‘wet field that half-hides the moon’, the forest and the sea. The voice and the imagery are arresting and distinctive. There is an air of dream, of mystery as trees are planted within the girl’s body. It is a whole world in a poem, and reading it feels like entering a portal.

Polly Atkin, 26^th August 2022

The three winning poems are in this document:

spelt-comp-winners-2022 Download

First Prize – Jen Campbell ‘The Hospital is Not My House’

Second Prize – Ojo Taiye ‘Strange Fruit’

Third prize – Annabelle Cormack ‘Roadkill’

Meet the winners

Jen Campbell is an author, book reviewer and disability advocate. She has written ten books for adults and children, spanning nonfiction, poetry, short stories and picture books. Her poetry collection ‘The Girl Aquarium’ is published by Bloodaxe.

www.jen-campbell.co.uk

Ojo Taiye is a Nigerian eco-artist and writer who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with society. Taiye’s most recent work is largely concerned with the effects of climate change, homelessness, migration, drought and famine, as well as a range of transversal issues ranging from racism, black identity and mental health. His current project explores neocolonialism, institutionalized violence and ecological trauma in the oil-rich, polluted Niger delta. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Salamander, Consequence Forum, Stinging Fly, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Banshee, Willow Springs, Lambda Literary, Fiddlehead, Puritan, Frontier Poetry, Notre Dame Review, or Strange Horizon. Taiye worked on the Future(s) 2021 with Catalyst Arts and Belfast Photo Festival and 2021 Sustrans Black History Month Art Project.

Annabelle Cormack is a poet, writer and Creative Writing graduate from Bath Spa University. Having grown up in the French countryside, many of Annabelle’s poems focus on the beauty and brutality of nature and the way that patriarchal violence can be perpetuated within the isolation of rural communities. Annabelle is currently studying for her MA, juggling several chaotic jobs, and working on a novel about cheerfully amoral witches and unkillable kings.

Short List

Jen Campbell

Annabelle Cormack

Kate Feld

Tim Hannigan

Sarah Leavesley

Damen O’Brien

Samuel Prince

Ojo Taiye

Sarah Westcott

Dominic Weston

Long List

Amy Abdullah Barry

Angela Arnold

Beattie

Heidi Beck

Mike Brown

Liz Byrne

Jen Campbell

Stewart Carswell

Ross Cogan

Annabelle Cormack

Kate Feld

Tim Hannigan

Sara Impey

Lesley James

Dillon Jaxx

Sarah Leavesley

Charlotte Murray

Damen O’Brien

Samuel Prince

Thea Smiley

Ojo Taiye

Eleanore Taylor

Laura Theis

Scarlett Ward Bennett

Nicola Warwick

Sarah Westcott

Dominic Weston

Joanna Wright (with two poems)

Luke Samuel Yates

Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, living in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), supported a 2020 Northern Writers Award. Her biography of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness. She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability.

Here is everything you need to know to enter the competition. Please read our rules carefully. Scroll down to read last year’s winners!

How to Enter:

Use the payment button below to pay for your entry
Attach your poems in one word document, making sure your name is no where on the document.
Email your entry to speltmagazine@gmail.com COMPETITION in the subject line.
Include in the body of the email your name, address, PayPal payment reference, title/s of your poem/s.

GOOD LUCK!

Winners: 2021

First Place

Sarah Mnatzaganian

Somerset soundtrack

Jack-jack-jackdaws yack-yack everywhere and here’s a car
and trailer squawking steel, stinking diesel. Ferns lick
into the lane and goose grass grapples up the hedge.
Just imagine your slipslap feet don’t sound menacing
to small creatures. Hear the soil drink last night’s rain,
breathe the fat green air until another car passes ~ hello
goodbye – with a sad-eared dog in the back. Cheecheechee
if you could learn these birdcalls, life would be sweeter.
Ten young ash have all died back. Where will the birds
sit tomorrow? A DPD van barrels past the festival gate.
It’s just a restival this year, no Glasto crowd, no music.
Turn right to Cockmill, nicking, slicking downhill
through dog-rosed, blackbirded, Stella-canned hedges.
Pylons cricklecrackle down the valley, make ears shrink
like baked snails as the buzz builds. Worthy Farm sign says
Don’t shoot in these fields – there are lovely cows and even
lovelier people wandering everywhere – Michael Eavis.
Lark, you’re in charge of the morning and oak trees
have possession of this lane. Come down to the dark ford
where midges pixillate the stream and roots have woven
a bank and there’s a call to prayer from the young oaks.
Maybe you can tell me the name of the singer? Listen,
it says all the right things to the mosquitos celebrating
over the water as I trudge my heart hard uphill home.

Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo Armenian poet based in Ely, UK. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter’ will be published by Against the Grain Press in Spring 2022. Sarah’s work has appeared in The North, The Rialto, Poetry News, Poetry Wales, Magma, Pennine Platform, Fenland Reed, London Grip, Atrium and many anthologies. She was a winner in the Poetry Society’s winter 2020 members’ competition on the theme of ‘Youth’.

2nd Place

Rachel Davies

Fen Music


I was born by the nubbins, the ’ood-huss, the wood of it, 
the teul-huss and yale-huss; the Whittlesey webbed feet of it. 
The wool packs of high cloud, the dropple and mizzle, 

the pudges and rudges, the skradge of a water-break, 
the dykes, sokes and dotchels, the sea-draining wet of it.  
The driving the hosses to the Chatteris factory 

where post-holes are mass produced, the pick-‘em-
off your clothes of it. The darsen’t goo noo back’rder,
the gooin’ down Delph, but the gooin’ up Thorney of it.

The August moon silence when puddocks stop singing, 
the hoolet and herringshaw, fellfer and pewit. 
The dockey bag, red hanky, hunks o’ ruddy chaise of it 

with thick wodges of home-baked. The lash eggs, 
the hossmuck, the roobub to grow in it. 
The suffink gooin’ round with its colds, coughs and snaizes,  

its tizzick, its bellyache, its uppards and downards, 
the dang that warsp stang me of it. I was born in the Fens, 
to the flat universe of it, the everlasting blue of it,
the lilt, lift and sing of it. The be-buggered-for-a tale of it.

Rachel Davies is widely published in journals and anthologies and has been a prize-winner in several poetry competitions. Her debut pamphlet, Every Day I Promise Myself, was published by 4Word Press in December 2020. She is co-ordinator of the Poetry Society Stanza for East Manchester and Tameside. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry, both from Manchester Metropolitan University.

3rd Place

Diana Cant

George

We met him the day we moved in, across the boundary fence,
talking to the air to the left of us, gruff, suspicious of the in-comers,
not entirely to be trusted with the view of his backyard.

Stomach bulging over leather belt, check shirt, haphazard buttons,
slightly lascivious stare; a carrion fortune made by scavenging
wrecked cars, the worn-out farm his wife’s for generations.

How did we prove ourselves? We were never sure. Perhaps it was a friend
in common, or a furious boundary war, settled later with smoother words;
perhaps it was the seasons passing, a gradual growth of rural trust,

or perhaps it was just seeing us, gradually tending our small patch,
doing the same ordinary tasks that mark existence - planting,
mowing, mending broken fences, putting out the bins.

We came to know the kindness that he carried deep inside,
hidden as in a moleskin bag, dark and gentle to the touch,
offered in those moments when we needed it the most.

It never struck us we would miss him, thought he always would be there,
at the fence, talking to the air. Now we miss his heavy tread,
the midnight weave of torchlight as he walked the fields in search of sleep.

Diana Cant is a child psychotherapist with an MA in Poetry from Newcastle University / The Poetry School. Her poems have been published in various anthologies, and most recently in The Alchemy Spoon and Finished Creatures. Her pamphlet, Student Bodies 1968, was published last year by Clayhanger Press, and her second pamphlet, At Risk – the lives some children live, has just been published by Dempsey and Windle.

Special Mentions (in no particular order)

After the Fire
Thea Smiley

The earth is black. Leaves rattle on the branches.
Pine cones are glossy as though lacquered, cracked.
The red fruit of the strawberry tree is singed.
There’s a melted glass bottle beside the track.

No birdsong. No cicadas. No lizards. No butterflies.

Every terrace wall and ruin is visible.
A dust devil crosses a far slope like smoke.
Chainsaws echo around the hills, logging pine
and eucalyptus, drowning out the bells.

We clear the land, cut down the burnt quince,
olive, sweet chestnut and orange trees, trim back
bramble shoots, rock rose and bright green bracken,
luminous against the blackened ground.

No bats in the cellar. No geckos behind the mirror. No rats.

Just splats of ash on the attic floor, washed through
the tiles when the fire-plane flew over and dropped
its cargo of water. In the courtyard, the fruit
is bigger than ever. Fat grapes hang from the vine.

Peaches, pears, and apples swell, well-watered.
But the goat shed roof is bowed, close to collapse.
In the lean-to, the composting loo’s gauze vent
has melted, and the tank needs to be emptied.

We carry it across the yard by its rope handles,
and a loud, low buzzing comes from inside.
In the dark, beneath the cover, crawling over
the waste, are the last embers of the fire.

No. No embers. No fire.

Crawling over the compost is a hoard of beetles.
They rise as each in turn is ignited by sun,
whirring like machines made of weighty metal,
propelled into the sky by intricate engines.

When the hillside is wrapped in a starless night
and ash from a distant fire falls in the torchlight,
we think of the scarabs emerging from darkness
and shining like amulets in sunlight.

Thea Smiley is a writer from rural Suffolk. Her plays have toured with Wonderful Beast Theatre Company and been performed at the INK and HighTide Festivals. Her short stories have been published in anthologies, and her poetry was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2020 and has featured in Spelt and Streetcake Magazine in 2021. She is delighted to receive a special mention for two poems in the Spelt Poetry Competition.

A Clearing

Sean Winn

Wandering in the woods, I came upon the carcass of a cow, the feet of her calf protruding from her, white against the black haunches of its mother. The calf refused exit, pushed only to its shoulders. Vultures crowded the clearing, tearing at flesh and warning one another other off with outstretched wings and hisses. They are majestic, graceful creatures when circling at altitude, riding air currents with hardly a flutter. But up close, they are sinister: mangy, featherless heads of ill proportion — living gargoyles. Nature’s garbage collectors, but the cow and calf were Madonna and Child.

Get! I yelled, rushing the clearing. A whoosh of wings filled the space. But I pulled up after only a few strides, unsure what was next. Likewise, the carrion-eaters settled back to wait me out, blank-faced and patient. Silly boy, they may have thought. The wind changed, and decay punched me into gagging retreat. The feast would continue.

Sean Winn is a new phase writer whose poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in more than two dozen literary journals. His most recent publications are in the San Antonio Review, Bosphorus Review of Books, and The Night Heron Barks. After living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia, he now calls Austin, Texas, USA home.

Bird Count

Carole Bromley

Two wood pigeons, two blackbirds, one robin. 
Wrens have deserted us, finches no longer come
for the nyjer seed, thrushes are a distant memory. 
A magpie visits once a year to plunder nests 
or a sparrowhawk drops in to butcher a blue tit.
All the neighbours get their binoculars out 
the day the fieldfares come to strip the crab apple.

In Australia the bullies are winning:
warbling magpies, cockies, currawongs,
native miner birds, rainbow lorikeets.
Even the sand-piper swoops at your head
and the crested pigeon is making his move.
On the rooftop a kuckaburra laughs his head off.
Smaller birds are driven deep into the bush.

Meanwhile, in the Amazon, 
the white bellbird breaks the record
for the loudest call ever recorded.
Three times louder than the screaming piha,
it would drown out a pneumatic drill.
During courtship he yells his second note
in the female’s face. She’s ready, takes a step back.

In the reed beds and marshes, the bittern’s call 
is louder than an outboard motor. On the Heath
nightingales have turned up the volume.
Keats would have covered his ears
or hurried indoors from the plum tree,
Shelley put on noise-cancelling headphones
and walked for days in search of a skylark.

Carole Bromley is a York-based poet, stanza rep and mentor. Three collections (including one for children) with Smith/Doorstop. A pamphlet, Sodium 136, was published by Calder Valley in 2019 and a new collection, The Peregrine Falcons of York Minster, cameout last year from Valley Press. Carole has won a number of prizes including the Bridport and the Hamish Canham Award.

Living Museum
Patricia Leighton

The brindled cat of time has seen it all
the slaughtered autumn pigs hung high
red knives, a blood-soaked bench
now
slathered Old Spot sow, obese, replete
pink piglets fostered out to infra-red.

Stables and tack room lit before dawn’s up
ploughmen and horses ready to walk and turn
acre on acre of soil until dark falls
now
big bay Joe and gloss-black Charlie Boy
work two-hour stints to show how it was done.

Ten cows each dairy maid, milked twice each day
butter to churn and market, loaves to bake
all hands to the field come hay and harvest time
now 
dogged volunteers keep up old ways
and children tease a full-size plastic cow.

A constant come-and-go from the big house
money well spent, benevolent busyness 
tenancies nurtured, children neatly schooled
now
mellowed bricks, a garden widowed with age
and leaded lights reflecting what is left.

A Janus quirk of time at every turn
displays of painted plough parts, in deep grass
machine parts rusting, brickwork and timbers down
how 
to attract/preserve on a slim purse
replace old hands, old ways, in a fast world.

The cat looks on, narrows her eyes and purrs
grooms her rich browns and melts into the dark.

Patricia Leighton lives in Worcestershire and if not at home is likely to be wandering around or indulging her binoculars at the local wildlife reserve. She workshops with the Shropshire based Border Poets and St John’s Poetry Group, Worcester. She has work published in a range of journals including Acumen, The North, Orbis, Sarasvati and Fair
Acre Press anthologies. Her collection, ‘Hidden’, was published by Oversteps Books, 2019.

Growing Up in a Country Village

Jules Whiting

We’re at the edge of prophetical pond,
where time turns water to a caked crust,
clogs it with animal tracks, balloon skins,
broken sticks. Where a cut branch –

not realising it’s dead – carries on growing
tiny green buds, and another glows
with mustard-coloured lichen.
And the very air hangs with the smell of rape,

strike-bright when viewed from our deepness
in these trees. And Caroline instructs me
that all boys are knobs, as we drink
from a bottle of her dad’s home-made wine.

As the evening dies behind my back,
It is there – in that shin-tangle, in the loud swap
of pigeon wings, thwacking leaves, lashing greenery –
the knowledge of how this will end.

And tomorrow when I’m balanced on the kerb
of the roundabout in St Leonard Square
where the corporation flowers have no smell
and the church bells are ringing. I will believe

the world is my oyster, because I’m sixteen,
not in school uniform and it’s my first afternoon
of work and I’m outside The Green Tree
where on Sunday afternoon they have strippers.

Jules Whiting, Oxfordshire has an MA from Bath Spa University. Short listed for Gloucester Prize 2020, and commended in the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2020, her poems have appeared in Acumen, Orbis, South, Envoi, Interpreters House, The High Window, Haibun Journal and various anthologies including Stanley Spencer Poems, Two Rivers Press, Best of British, PaPer Swans Press, A Hatchery of Shadows, SciPo 2019, What the Peacock Replied, Dempsey& Windle 2019.

A Vague Manifesto

Mark Fiddes
.
The lanes just stopped singing.
Our fields are already runny with fear.
Later, they will take the grown pigs 
from low barns for weighing in slings
before transportation and slaughter. 
Even the ones without nick names 
will hit over ninety decibels,
not that anyone counts pain that way,
but the screams will journey on 
in megahertz past vast black holes 
to the planets that still care and wonder
how Earth produced such terror when
it started as the paradise destination
for weary, wandering travelers.
Statistics also state that a modest place
like this, dressed in brick and shade,
will see a birth, a death, or a marriage 
this week which we will honour 
with formal wear and fresh flowers
from as far away as Kenya.
One day they may also start counting
the ounces of blackbird per hectare,
the carats of wheat and wayside daisies,
the kilowatts of human per household, 
their ohms of love and hate.
Until then, let us be vague as midges
and river mist and talk in tongues
too hot and muscular for dictionaries.

Mark Fiddes has just published his second collection titled *Other Saints Are Available with Live Canon,following on from The Rainbow Factory (Templar) and his pamphlet The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre (Templar).In the past few years, he has won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Prize and been third in the UK National Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, The London Magazine andThe Irish Times among many other titles.

SPELL
Mariah Whelan

In the alleyway between manicured lawns and endless yellow fields
I stand under leylandii branches and drink the green air.

Here is my crown of late-summer midges, trails of golden spiderwebs
that fall over the tunnel’s carpet of broken tarmac and dandelions—

I am casting a spell into this lockdown, speak magic with my body
as I walk through this market town’s borderwork of Elder and dry brambles:

at the broken Jubilee bench I take the path that ends in a galvanised gate,
mount its thin bars, hold myself at its zenith to feel the clatter of my ankle bones,

deep collisions of wrists and rib that sound out a map of where I need to go.
And like the muntjac, who know north by the iron in their blood,

I follow this invisible magic thread knotted to my belly and guts
out into Tapper’s Field where the sky has been ripped off like a ring-pull tin—

all the birds: a skylark, house martins, the high swifts and circling kites rush
to fill the endless column of blue. Watching them here, at this exact point

where the town gives way to not-town, I leave my body behind, press
what’s left of me through hazel, brackens— keep moving inwards and under

until finally I reach the place where the bluebottles and midges sing,
where the cotton flower and dandelions cradle the knuckle of spring water

that is the woods’ green core. The stream is bone cold, breath clear,
and I ask now for soil and mould spores, all the glorious bacteria

to break what’s left of me down. Dissolved into nitrogen, calcium, iron,
the ash roots and hazel carry me through their trunks, currency my minerals

through their flesh into the trees’ thick arms, the filagree of veins that line
each leaf— gifting molecules of what I once was out into the endless blue.

Mariah is a poet and academic from Oxfordshire. Her novel-in-sonnets the love i do to you was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Prize, won the AM Heath Prize and was an Oxford Poetry Library Book of the Month. She is the Jacqueline Bardsley Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, Cambridge and a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London where she explores the relationship between poetry and academic practice.

Gorge

Jen Feroze

Whenever there’s an icebreaker about where we come from,
my answer always elicits the same smile:
‘Oh yeah, that’s where the cheese is made!
I’m pretty sure I went there with my school once.’
So many kids bussed in to stare through cloudy glass
at curds, nonplussed, craning their necks upwards at the cliffs.

It’s funny the way hormones can flatten even the highest cliffs,
can make centuries of river-worn limestone a stage, from
which we played out our teenage dramas. Raise a glass
to the breathtaking arrogance of middle school. Smile
at the fact that we never stopped to take stock, not once,
we assumed these caves, these dripping stalactites came ready made.

There was the time our history teacher made
the front pages, connected by strands of DNA to the cliffs,
to the ancient bones found there, to the man that once
inhabited their skin. 10,000 years, and he’d not moved a mile from
the dig site, was drilling us on The Iron Curtain, smiling
at the sudden smallness of his concept of history, polishing his glasses.

Some summer nights we’d smuggle blankets and cider and glasses
over the stile and onto Black Rock. Fires were lit, pacts were made
breath was snatched. Some things were lost, others found. The sky split in a smile,
loosing meteors like teeth. We lay on our backs, knees mimicking the cliffs,
until the shadows of our friends became indistinguishable from
one another. I felt drunk and happy and sad and too old and too young, all at once.

Then limestone stained siren blue brought us up short, for once.
We hugged our own ribs close, carried our bones like glass.
He was the brother of a friend’s friend. There were painful verbs to choose from:
To fall? To jump? Was it worse if a decision had been made?
For a short while, we looked with reverential gaze and sweaty palms at the cliffs,
then the flowers died, Christmas came, and he was buried again under forgetful smiles.

After school we scattered to the winds, city-bound, throwing smiles
over our shoulders. So sure of our futures, and never once
pausing to give thanks or even glance back to those cliffs.
So desperate were we to be grown, to be skyscrapered behind glass,
to be able to say we got out, we did it, we made
something of ourselves, away from that shadowed small town we came from.

And as they have always done, the cliffs stand silent, a knowing smile
carved from water and rock into the landscape of so many childhoods. Only once
we left, did I see how we’d been shaped, hot as freshly blown glass; forged, gorge-made.

Having grown up in the West Country, Jen Feroze now lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small sleep thieves. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has recently appeared in Doghouse Press, Gingernut Magazine and The Mum Poem Press. Jen’s debut collection, The Colour of Hope, was published in 2020. Find her on instagram @the_colourofhope and on Twitter (where she mainly retweets pictures of owls falling over and other searingly insightful content) @jenlareine.

Th Spelt Poetry Competition 2023 opens 1st April 2023.

Rules

How to Enter:

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Previous Winners

Spelt Poetry Competition 2022

Winners: 2021

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