Sarah James, "Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic"

Sarah James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer, also published as Sarah Leavesley. Her poetry has featured in the Guardian, Financial Times and Poems of the Decade 2011-2020: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2011-2020, as well as in a café mural, on the BBC, on buses and in the Blackpool Illuminations. She is the author of eight poetry titles, an Arts Council England-funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room, two novellas and a touring poetry-play. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020, the manuscript for Sarah’s latest collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press 2022) won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021. In her spare time, Sarah is a keen walker, cyclist and swimmer, especially enjoying nature outdoors. Meanwhile, her spare room is home to V. Press, publishing award-winning poetry and flash fiction. Her website is here.

About Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic

Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is award-winning poet Sarah James’s exploration of forty years living with type one diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune condition that is now treatable, but remains incurable. The collection tracks her personal journey from diagnosis, age six, to adulthood, including the high and the low points, as well as the further long-term health risks lurking in the background. These are poems of pain, but also of love and beauty, taking in motherhood, family, nature, aging and establishing self-identity in a constantly updating world. The route to some kind of acceptance and belonging may be troubled by ‘trying to escape’ but it also ‘holds / more light than your eye / will ever know.’ The manuscript for Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021 and the collection is available from Verve Poetry Press here.

From Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic, by Sarah James

Thick-skinned, Thin-fleshed

on diabetes type 1

In the old young days: piss
          on diastix, and a glass syringe
twice the length of my palm.

On the children’s ward, I practised
          on thick oranges. Pushing a needle
through the fruit’s peel was so

unlike the ice-cold sting
          of pressing it through my own
thin-fleshed skin, the weight

of glass in my hand, pushing
          the plunger home. This sterilised
in my mum’s special saucepan,

while I played houses, and childhood.
          Later, lighter plastic for injections,
then a cannula and pump.

Blood tests now, for precision.
          Fingertips pricked to a scarred
numbness. For thirty-five years,

the red of life with a glint of steel.
          Each needle’s point etches
my mind; my body’s rubbed hard

by time. I carry the condition’s
          sharp sweetness in my blood;
its other daily stabs as invisible

as genetics. My fingers are a scabby
          black braille of blood-test marks,
and the smell of man-made insulin.

This wet dependence is survival.

Promise

He starts with a well-placed breath,
hint of a tingle blown gently
across the nape of my neck.

And again. I am a mouth-organ
with many quivering reeds;
silent vibrations amplify inside.

One by one, he un-hooks each bone
of my spine, lower, lower,
and still no lip-touch, no kisses, not

a single brush of finger on skin,
but oh, the soft rush of air,
the slow – fast, fast – slow press

of his presence. I breathe
seduction in.

Along the Edge

Living beside the canal towpath, every day brings doorstep birdsong, frogs and the water’s glisten, pulling me closer.

Moorhens snip the surface; a swan ruffles up a lace dress with her feather-stitched wake towards her reed-moored nest. Shimmering light hides the fast paddling beneath, the deeper flit of fish, and other sunken secrets – rusted metal re-sculpted by weed.

This evening, the hedgerow is a chorus of bird chatter and May blossom. Snazzy bulrushes and tall grasses sway to the late hours’ slow jazz.

As I watch from the footbridge, the sun’s touch warms my skin: a thin layer of amber silks across everything still within the day’s reach.

Here, I’ve no need for frog-princes – the canal carries my love without spilling.

Before night seals over, time skips a single heartbeat. It’s just long enough for me to lift my arms like wings, and dream the ease of quiet flight: rising as high as a whooper swan, looping and curving with the water, but always returning to this, my reed-moored home.

                                                                                     sleep is a ripple
                                                                                     of unseen breaths; a lone owl
                                                                                     hoots through the darkness

Kathy Pimlott, "the small manoeuvres"

 

Kathy Pimlott was born and raised in Nottingham but has spent the last 45+ years living and working in Covent Garden, specifically Seven Dials, home of the broadsheet and the ballad. Her debut full collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press in April 2022. She has two pamphlets with The Emma Press, Elastic Glue (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016), and her poems are published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her poem ‘Closeups in Lockdown’ was one of just 20 chosen for inclusion in the Poetry Archive’s Now! Wordview 2020 Collection. Kathy has been a social worker and community activist, worked on a political and financial risk journal, in arts television and artist development. She currently earns her living as the administrator of a community-led charitable trust.

About the small manoeuvres 

In this, her first full collection, Pimlott slips her arm through ours and draws us in with her deceptively easy and intimate address, separating out the threads that make us – history, class, education, family, work, friendships – to examine 'the small manoeuvres that trundle us over the drop and on.' She weaves back and forwards through a lifetime with a mordant humour laced with tenderness. Fine-tuned to the oddness and beauty of the ordinary, she celebrates them with a relish for the deliciousness of language. There are mice, possible lions, natty Soho dogs, poison, georgette and a mermaid, apples, temples and gentrification, sticky carpets, vegan Bratwurst and aqueducts – something for everyone in this unsettling dance through time, characters and place.   

From the small manoeuvres, by Kathy Pimlott

Return to the Terminus

Too often now I sway into the night,  
that cosy winter dark between tea and
the turning out of pubs and cinemas, 
a late traveller fogging a rattling bus. 
See me on the upper deck with the dogs 
and other coughers, taken up with smoking 
in that sophisticated way, dragon-nostrils. 

I shouldn’t keep going back, am already yellow 
beyond scrubbing. These comfortable excursions
just won’t do while all the while life howls 
for attention. Last year a clever man I knew 
a bit courted a death he didn’t believe in. 
Visiting, face it, out of a desire to be blessed,
by happenstance I was invited into the scan,

into the intimacy of his scarred insides, 
to witness a death sentence, 90% sure, but, ah, 
that golden 10. First question: can I still 
have a drink? He died, swollen, in a hard clutch. 
And now this other man, mine, heads that way too. 
But anyhow, look, here comes the whipsmart clippie 
machine grazing her hip, its crank and buttons 

primed for pernickety fares. Only she commands
the bell: one for stop, two sharp dings for go. 
If I don’t tell you, how will you ever know about 
that bronco ride of side benches, the fear of slipping 
right off the bus as the driver speeds, skips stops, reckless 
on corners, to the end of his shift? It’s late, so join me, 
grip the pole, lean out into those bright, melancholy lights.

 
The Grand Union Canal Adventure

We three old girls, fractured 
by the usual losses, aren’t mended 
Japanese-style with precious seams 
that make each fissure sing,
but rivetted: serviceable, not art.

To prove our mettle, we choose 
to chug along the old Grand Union,
moor by fields of roosting geese 
to sway in darkness on the water’s 
shallow, dreamless shift.
 
Forty feet above the Ouse, I’m left.
The others go below to show me 
I can, despite my doubts, skipper us
along the strait way of the aqueduct, 
not falter, step back into empty air 

down into the river’s wilder waters. 
On a narrow boat there’s no choice
but to make the small manoeuvres 
that trundle us over the drop and on, 
now and again to know the satisfaction 

of a perfect approach to a bend. 
Shins bruised, knuckles scraped raw, 
we tie up, step ashore to climb the hill
up to the Peace Pagoda, so golden, 
so unlikely, outside Milton Keynes.

Carrie Etter, "The Shooting Gallery"

Carrie Etter grew up in Normal, Illinois, lived in southern California for thirteen years, and moved to England in 2001. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a pamphlet of flash fiction, Hometown (V. Press, 2016). Her latest pamphlet is The Shooting Gallery (Verve, 2020), which you can read about below. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her website is here.

 

About The Shooting Gallery

The Shooting Gallery juxtaposes two series of prose poems: one responding to Czech surrealist artist Toyen's The Shooting Gallery (1939-40), a series of line drawings bringing together imagery of childhood and war; and one responding to US school and university shootings since Columbine High School in 1999. Both series explore the surreality and starkness of this conjunction of youth and violence. You can read an extract from The Shooting Gallery below. You can read more about the pamphlet, and order it here. 

From The Shooting Gallery

Normal Community High School, Illinois, 2012

At first, what rattled / was the proximity, the intimacy— / gunfire only a mile from / my family home. For days I wore the knowledge / like chain mail, my torso / heavier, my shoulders / newly weighted. I Googled. I found in my town Darnall’s Gun Works & Ranges, C.I. Shooting Sports. I found photos of / the aftermath, the brawny teacher leading a column of students / away, away, / the huddled parents, waiting, the / reunions, the mother and son— / — / the son’s t-shirt: a drawing of a boy wearing his baseball cap backwards / his eye to the viewfinder / of a machine gun, its long belt of cartridges ready— / mother
and son and his t-shirt—this / is where I come from.