Mingle E-Book

Caleb Parkin

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 49

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Caleb Parkin's dark and mischievous second poetry collection Mingle stirs up the toxicities between landscapes, ecosystems and bodies, in poems bubbling over with hyper-wealth and haunted by tarnished ideals. Through creatures, compounds and chemicals, the poems probe what makes up our world's matter, and how we use it for good or ill. From gold to hydrocarbons, radioactive gardening to viral memes, the resulting mixture is a potent poetic cocktail… Here, intimate connections and grand narratives are unsettled; we are implicated in prickly histories and weird futures and the natural world reminds us of its unruliness – as well as our own. Reflections warp in noxious ponds and voices distort and echo in uncanny landscapes. At times hyperreal and surreal, adventurous and technicolour, Mingle fizzes with the possibilities of queered language and altered states of poetic form.

Leseprobe

Mingle

Mingle

Caleb Parkin

ISBN: 978-1-916760-06-6

eISBN: 978-1-916760-07-3

Copyright © Caleb Parkin, 2024.

Cover artwork © Georgia Robinson, 2024.

www.georgiarobinsonart.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Caleb Parkin has asserted their right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2024 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed on recycled paper in the United Kingdom by Imprint Digital.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For my friends (and my foes)

Contents

Mingling Ritual

I.

keep in mind always the beginnings of things

SEXTANK

Alfresco

Whiptail Manifesto

Centaur

The Landscape of Fear

Hornet

Infinity Mirror

Hotel Hydrocarbon

meditation   as king canute

19 Gigabecquerels

Mrs Howorth’s Irradiated Nuts

Ricinus in Spring, 2020

II.

Self-Portrait as Diary

Our South African National Parks

Presence

AUCTION

Nature Is (Not) Healing

Mickey Pandemic

Serving Dragon’s Blood on the Escape Pod

M, as a river

The Orca BnB

Waterlily House

A pond in Maui turned pink

Queertopia (Working Title)

GOLD

I Found It Beautiful

How to Be 2-D

III.

Nuclear Beetroot

What does cancer smell like to an ant?

learning to spell ‘leukaemia’

It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage

Two Tablespoonfuls

Burying the Sky

Tomorrow’s Yield

Archive

Narcissus Aesthetics

Ten Reflections on the Same Pond

O Saint Astronaut

Rave Babies

Buy-A-Bear

St Francis Christens the Animals in Notre-Dame, on Fire

A Pink Sink

Notes

Acknowledgements and Thanks

About the author and this book

“Pardon my asking, but do you think I could drink

this and be okay? I am still learning the scents

of poisons, can’t yet smell them in the wild. Sip it

and tell me if you die.”

                            – Kaveh Akbar, ‘Aubade’

“I can’t even find a pond small enough

to drown in without being ostentatious”

                            – Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems

“It’s one of the biggest hits of Britney Spears’ career,

but fans are only just realising that the iconic opening

to Toxic is actually a sample.”

                            – Huffington Post

Mingling Ritual

after C A Conrad

go into the kitchen

fling the cupboard doors asunder

grab at the packets of food     rip open

wok-ready noodles   oatcakes   a bucket of peanut butter

                            (should anyone challenge you

                                   say that this process is the opposite

                                          of waste)

              sink your whole palm in

              the Nutella   or whatever   your poison   wear

              the packets of pasta   like crunchy mittens

              open tins   of chickpeas   butterbeans

              delve your fingers into cans   like legumey

              earthworms   questing     whatever you have

                                          feel it on your fingertips   do not wash

                                          your hands   between foodstuffs   allow

                                          the aquafaba to moisten the dried

                                          fusilli   acknowledge the oats   in the teabags

                                          bear witness   to the contamination

                            as you touch each raisin welcome every crinkly

                            story at your fingertips   their life in earth

                            their full moon harvesting   their desiccation

                            feel yourself wither   in the vivacious sun

                            then become processed     if you do not know

              what a nutmeg is   allow it to speak through

              the dark ridges   of its grated hemisphere

              now smear your hand    across an untouched week

              in your diary   when you reach that time

              you will register   the emanating odour

then think about     BICYCLES

their mechanisms & textures   their character & potential

if you have a bicycle   go & touch it all over

tickle under its mudguards   stroke its oily rims

              wipe these too across your diary   returning

              to today’s pencilled appointments   next time you notice   a bicycle

              or whenever you travel   or think about travelling

              journey between   mechanisms   &   food   in your mind

                            eat every meal like a cycle

                            up a severe gradient

                            see each bicycle as a last meal

                            keep in mind always the beginnings of things

I.

keep in mind always the beginnings of things

should you almost step on

the wrinkled pink nub of a bird

fallen   you suppose   having only just

twisted from its egg   soft beak groping

into sunlight   among silver birch branches

their pale buds quaking   ghastly with light-

hunger   so you look above to each

fork in that trunk   hunt evidence of nests

to plot the trajectory of this fall   as if

to know means anything   as if

to trace the cause is a cure

SEXTANK

giant isopod erotica

you better twerk-twitch your segments

over   haul that pale-lilac-plated-ass right

here   so we can grind those seven pairs

of pereiopods    my god imagine our

mancae babes   imagine each of their

identical names   say each of them

from each   of your four   sets of jaws

they’ll be just like us   those microgiants

just add you   me   a sprinkle   of sulphur

just add my built-in Birkin marsupium

bursting with eggs and determination

light my fuse and don’t   stand   back

we are sextanks   seabed bullets

feel these hydrothermal vents

crumble   crack   with our heat

Glossary:

Marsupium: “Mature females develop a brood pouch or marsupium when sexually active, the pouch being formed by overlapping oostegites or brood plates grown from the medial border of the pereiopods”.

Pereiopods: each of the eight walking limbs of a crustacean such as a crab or lobster, growing from the thorax.

Mancae: young isopods emerge from the marsupium as miniatures of the adults, known as mancae.

Alfresco

yet cruising areas, littered with used condoms and cigarette butts, seem sacrosanct

  – National Post (Vancouver), 2007

O boys   perhaps you needed

              a place to rest your knees

                            a clearing to feel soft breezes

              on those over-covered parts

                            of yourselves   maybe for smoke

                            to roil from your mouths

                                          like   c u m u l u s   clouds

                            which rumble in   threaten

              to break you up   with sharp

      prickles   unless   in high summer

              its arrival on backs   flanks

                            is felt   only after   in its flows