Poems by Martina Evans

Lying in bed in Balls Pond Road with Dora 


The wind’s travelling forty-five miles per hour 
wisteria blossoms fall and flood 
into every corner of the house. 
I shouldn’t leave the basement casement window open 
after what happened to the bathroom window in 2013 – 
but I have to smell the lilac before it passes on. 
The children are screaming from De Beauvoir 
School playground like they’re being turned
on the spit of a rollercoaster. 
Dora jumps on the windowsill 
her beard streaming like Jeremiah the prophet. 
The wind lifts its fist every few minutes, 
pillaging the Fuchsia Riccartonii 
throwing the terracotta pots around. 
I would go out to save my Cheyenne Spirit Echinacea
if I wasn’t trying to write a poem.

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The Engine Running 


Soft Morning City! Lsp! I Am Leafy Speafing
in the twingling of an eye… - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
            
I heard a song
and when I peered out, I knew it was
eight o clock because 
the light had entered the old porch through 
the cracked glass in the six-inch window.
The man on his steering wheel
filmed Donny on his iPhone 
when we went out on the front step 
the grey tent of sky sagging with rain
a seagull screaming on its rope 
of air and an ambulance 
and a fire engine, all screaming
while the traffic rumbled on 
a low earthquake of cars 
and omnibuses for more than a hundred years, 
and horses here in Hackney before that.
Will it ever stop and flood
like that dream I dreamt 
when I opened the front door 
and there was nothing 
but a canal
flowing down 
the Balls Pond Road
like it was Amsterdam
and someone said
the book of depth is closed
step out of your shell. 

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Martina Evans is a poet and novelist, the author of ten books of prose and poetry. Burnfort Las Vegas was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2015 and The Windows of Graceland: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet in 2016. She is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck University and Royal Literary Fund fellow for the Reading Round 2014-2016. 

​Weblinks:
http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/15561/30/Martina-Evans
http://www.martinaevans.com/
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784102760

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