Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Competition winners

Women's Poetry Competition 2011

• 1st Prize: Jane Satterfield | 2nd Prize: Sarah Roby | 3rd Prize: Jane McKie
• Runners Up: Josephine Abbott, Charlotte Ansell, Pat Borthwick, Penny Boxall, Angela Cleland, Jo Haslam, Joanna Hill, Selima Hill, Sarah Hopkins, Tess Jolly, Jane Lovell, Elsa Braekkan Payne, Eileen Pun, Angela Readman, Julia Roberts, Lesley Saunders, Rebecca Shepard, Sarah Stewart, Liz Twizzle and Abigail A Zammit.

The War Years

by JANE SATTERFIELD

We spent them wisely, walking street fairs
off Times Square, wreathed in the righteous
scent of empanadas and roasted

corn. And under the grey
benediction of smoke
we managed to keep mad busy

in the vast erasures of televised
dramas whose sound might be muted
the moment tracers flashed on.

Later we’d gather simply
around farmhouse tables
where we sipped housemade

vodka and herb-infused elixirs.
It was easy to get distracted
by the more sophisticated stuff

coming from the back kitchen
outrage upstaged by a plate of sugar
snap peas. Upbeat hip hop

spooled on a soundtrack
amateurish and understudied
in our knowledge of explosive

delivery methods, concerted
efforts and sweeps. We learned
to breeze through security

checkpoints, secure
chocolate, books, even cell
phone minutes, amusing the wine

drinking patrons in the means
we used to dispel the gloom, in
the means we selected

to signify our support
with protest now no longer
our go-to for gravitas.

We spent them. Kept
our own counsel in the row
of graves, in the dreary

house party under the roiling
shadow of fog and the flag.

Women's Poetry Competition 2010

• 1st Prize: Margaret Livingston | 2nd Prize: Stephanie Norgate | 3rd Prize: Esther Morgan
• Runners Up: Sarah Westcott, Jenny Powell, Carole Bromley, Molly Hill, Kathy Pimlott, Kate Behrens, Julie-Ann Rowell, Esther Morgan, Andrea Holland, Emily Middleton, Breda Wall Ryan, Jane McKie, Shameam Akhtar, River Jones, Jessica Wallace, Pat Borthwick, Sheila K Barksdale, Stephanie Norgate, Judy Brown, Nancy Anne Miller.

The widower and his clothes

by MARGARET LIVINGSTON

The winter after
the weather organised his clothes.
He took to moors and beaches
and tentative horizons
that juggled sun and blizzards
on the ocean’s edge.

He took to rocks,
and sturdier boots,
and ditches where the rain
lay muttering with the moss
and dark newts lived a definite life
that made him feel unformed.

He looked to trees
their roots, like talons, holding on,
and found a heavier coat
that made his back seem real
and his arms more able
to push him through the day.

He wrapped a scarf
around his mouth to keep
his language warm, his words
in hibernation, while he
lingered on the hillside
where the frost was yet to melt.

The weather chose his clothes
that careful chrysalis, in which his heart
adjusted to the qualities of snow,
until the winter nuzzles into spring
and his fingers, in their gloves,
begin to think of touch.

Women's Poetry Competition 2009

• 1st Prize: Sarah Roby | 2nd Prize: Hilary Menos | 3rd Prize: Madeline Wright
• Runners Up: Marie Naughton, Victoria Cichy, Carolyn Waudby, Kath McKay, Jeanette Ayachi, Christine York, Anne Maney, Fani Papageorgiou, Marion Tracy, Jo Bellchambers, Janice Mackay, Pat Simmons, Helen Ivory, Jean Long, Kim Moore, Deborah Harvey, Catherine Whittaker, Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, Ann Alexander, Paula Jennings and Hayley Buckland.

The Inland Waterways (IW)

by SARAH ROBY

I am pushing the buggy back home and a horn comes from behind
Nice arse they shout What d’you feed it? and in their own comic timing
Cock? which steels me at the back of the chassis, boy and hardback books
as it begins to rain and I attach the cover to the frame so he is warm but
with air holes enough to let a butterfly dance and I continue to push, umbrella
in one hand, buggy in the other and whichever – elbow, hip, pubic bone –
is available to help, which takes me back and down rivulets
             to when Europe squared up and she took to the waters
sending cargo down the Grand Union canal with Olga, Sonia, Evelyn and
Emma who knew milk and handcream but hadn’t wanted a job in admin,
loading barges, red, gold and black, belly-flat to the Fenland tides, with
coal and pre-fab houses like a message in a bubble as yet unclapped
of peace with all mod cons although Life was hard goose-bumped and
stomach-shrunk, growing down to keep them warm, as crisp or limp
as an allotment lettuce, damp and rationed until a nudge of muscle
at the bicep, trousers and ciggies, ruddied, dried and coarsening, squatting
in the lives of those with afloat homes, and in particular, a boat man
whose nut-brown gaze levels, holds and whispers Idle Women like a name
and an ask. Now she serves on the Parish Council and under any other
business swings in a hammock, attempting to read the tattoos in the wrinkles,
remembering how the earth moved, this way and that
        Ready to catch? back home and he cups his hands in a bowl, palms
creasing the life lines and watches my face as I realise I have thrown
the wear of women too hard and the ball dives fast towards him.

Women's Poetry Competition 2008

• 1st Prize: Sibyl Ruth | 2nd Prize: Valerie Laws | 3rd Prize: Patricia Ace
• Runners Up: Nazneen Zafar, Hilary Menos, Elizabeth Berry, Alexandra Citron, Lesley Saunders, Heidi Williamson, Julie Lydall, Josie Turner, Kathy Towers, Siobhán Campbell, Nell Farrell, Sarah Westcott, Jo Verity, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Carole Bromley, Rosie Garland, Sarah Roby, Berta Freistadt, Frances Thompson, Kate Hunter.

A Song of Jean

by SIBYL RUTH

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean’s thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn’t enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean’s fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean’s demands for help. Her refusal of help that’s offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of potatoes.
Jean’s hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean’s name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean’s body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean’s black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean’s mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

Women's Poetry Competition 2007

• 1st Prize: Ann Alexander | 2nd Prize: Christine Webb | 3rd Prize: Vicki Husband
• Runners Up: Kathy Towers, Sue Ward, Helen Burke, Rachel Malham, Gill McEvoy, Jennifer Moore, Wendy Klein, Maggie Butcher, Sue Burge, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Catherine Smith, Josie Turner, Holly Magill, Heidi Williamson, Carole Bromley, Anne Ryland, Jane Seabourne, Doreen Hinchliffe, Claudie Jessop, Lisa M Lambon, Erin Revell, Victoria Cichy.

Too close

by ANN ALEXANDER

On the pillow to my right, the Scottish vicar’s wife,
still snoring. I observe, with tenderness,
her open mouth, spread hair.

On the pillow to my left, the conker face
of Ed the vagrant: he’s so deep in drugs
he seldom surfaces. The kind you might ignore
on some park bench, attended by an optimistic dog.
Who tends his dog?
I could reach out and touch him, but I won’t.

We are too close. All of us
have seen and heard each other doing, saying things
that should be done and said behind closed doors.
We know each other’s secrets.
We have witnessed all those small and sharp
unkindnesses that nurses bring.

They know me, in and out. Likewise,
I know his date of birth, his state of mind
– the doctors here discuss it, every day.
I know her age. The problems with her kids.
I know her desperation: Edinburgh vowels
aching to be understood in this broad Cornish place.

We have been levelled, me, him, her;
scared, scarred, trapped in the same boat
His bed’s his world. Her world’s 500 miles away
My world comes visiting at noon, tears in his eyes.

Women's Poetry Competition 2006

• 1st Prize: Marianne Burton | 2nd Prize: Diana Pooley | 3rd Prize: Octavia Lamb
• Runners Up: Pam Thompson, Kathleen McKay, Judy Brown, Hilary Menos, Julianne Klass, Margaret Ann Speak, Helen Luson, Josephine Haslam, Hilary Jenkins, Jessica Penrose, Sue Vickerman, Tiffany Atkinson, Rachel Curzon, Fiona Rintoul, Michelle O'Sullican, SJ Litherland, Sarah Cuddon, Sue Wood, Ellen Carrigan, Jean Harvey, Sheila Hillier, Megan Carver.

For a plain man

by MARIANNE BURTON

For a plain man you have fancy writing.
It announces itself on envelopes
in a fanfare of loops and curlicues.
Your letters clasp hands to dance galliards,
throw each other through the air, swooping
down lower than is strictly legible,
deeper than any teacher would have ticked.

You must have practised it under the desk
of the village school that wrote you off,
with short blunt pencils and scraps of paper
salvaged and stored in the empty inkwells,
working up rococo scripts whimsical
enough to summarise the man you prayed
you would become, just to spite them.

None of it comforts you of course. Not
your florid penmanship, nor the fact that
you are now important. The child still sits
under an alphabet frieze in cheap clothes,
tight lipped, trying to coil pot hooks into Os
of wonder and praise. You can’t get back
to tell him it worked out. None of us can.

Women's Poetry Competition 2005

• 1st Prize: Polly Clark | 2nd Prize: Pippa Little | 3rd Prize: Susan Utting
• Runners Up: Christy Ducker, Angela Kirby, Jeannette Cook, Caroline Gilfillan, Iris Woodford, Melanie Wright, Isabel Rogers, Sue Burge, Liz Coatman, Chrissie Gittins, Jenny Dawson, Allison McVety, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Pat Borthwick, Emily Dening, Melanie Wright, Pam Thompson, Angela Readman, Stephanie Norgate, Roselle Angwin, Harriet Powney, Linda Moody.

Buffalo mozzarella

by POLLY CLARK

When I say that I tasted him
I mean that I knew the stale
baby-press of his mouth,
his cold breath, and the way
he scratched the cushion of his thumb
on his stubbled cheek. See –

how he leans in the litterbin,
his arm digging deep,
to feel among the cut of beercans
the abominable plastic, the rub of old fat,
as if there should be flesh there,
something gentle to welcome him.

And then he finds it – the sundried tomato
and buffalo mozzarella sandwich
I had just one bite out of because I saw
the one thing that scared me most,
and I dropped my sandwich with its one
shell-shaped ticklishly damp bite out.

I didn't think that a mouth
more silent than mine
would nuzzle where my lips had been
and bite out a shape to caress mine,
nibbling, delicate, not rushing at all –
and that someone else's hunger

and sorrow and spit would devour mine.
When I say that I tasted him
I mean that the night shook me awake
and I saw the back of his head clearly
as he bent down into darkness and shame
to find out the truth about me.

Women's Poetry Competition 2004

• 1st Prize: Polly Clark | 2nd Prize: Annemarie Austin | 3rd Prize: Lisa Matthews
• Runners Up: Marianna Jones, Marlo Bester-Sproul, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Ros Barber, Amanda Parkyn, Alyson Hallett, Sarah-Jane Critchley, Jemma Borg, Ellen Phethean, Jane Parkinson, Heather Spears, Jeannette Cook, Sue Vickerman, Carole Bromley, Esther Morgan, Siriol Troup, Joan Hewitt, Lydia Fulleylove, Liz Cashdan, Helen Jayne Gunn, Julie-Ann Rowell, Anne Summerfield.

Women

by POLLY CLARK

I sail into the world of women,
in a magnificent ship that does not interest them.

I imagine this is what loving them is:
adding up the piecework of them,

the pale neck, the sudden crow’s feet,
the expensive lips saying of course of course.

I have learned their language, I can say
what do you think? like a native,

but they detect an accent in spite of me.
Their eyes rest on me over the wine.

Their secrets are palpable as money.
We trade, and I grow rich. I feel free.

We compare songs, the cuts on our wrists.
Sometimes I think I have found my home.

When I hold them, I hear their bones crying.
Their costly hair drifts and shines.