Poems by Hannah Lowe

If You Believe: Ribs


If you believe I saw Joe Harriott play in 1956
and in my good blue dress, danced all night
in that basement dive below Gerrard Street,
Joe howling through his sax, white shirt 
sweat soaked and gleaming in the spotlight, 
you may as well believe any of the things  
I dream on, listening to his music - 
the way he smelt up close say (of cigarettes 
and clove) when we took a corner table 
at the New Friends on Salmon Lane, gnawing the ribs 
he loved and in between chews just talking 
to me in that fatherly way he had.
You may as well believe that sometimes 
I put his records on and just start crying
and can’t stop crying, don’t even know
what I’m crying for – those decades in history
when men like Joe and my father were shadows
on English streets, or just the way
a melody can get you.  I walk the small rooms
of my flat, light spilling through the skylights,
the treetops just in sight through the glass
and even with all these tears, I’m sort of happy.
Richard says be careful what you do in poems
to real people (known people), but surely this poem
shows its seams enough to let me wish
that Joe didn’t start dying so young (at gigs
he couldn’t even stand up straight to play),
that men he used to jam with didn’t see 
his broken body shuffling down the streets 
and turn away, and those last morphine days, 
the dog he saw barking at the window 
of the third floor ward really wasn’t there –
well, how could it be, if Joe and me just stepped 
from the club into this winter night, 
heading arm in arm down Brewer Street 
to order steaming bowls of won ton soup?





Sax I


That gold horn hung out of you nightly
like a distended tongue – the fix you craved
at The Sunset Club or on The Blue Room’s stage 
or the ‘generous’ hours you played 
in backroom jams, oh boy, you needed it.


Rajah, Theorist, Sire, the way you saw yourself,
that gold bone stuck out, perked up by hot white girls 
on stools who lapped you up, but the sex that night 
was solo, Joe, eyes closed, your throat wide open,
walking alone, the gold road to heaven.

About the poet

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Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has lived in London, Brighton and Santa Cruz, California. She studied American Literature at the University of Sussex and has a Masters degree in Refugee Studies. She has worked as a teacher of Literature and Creative Writing, recently completed her work on a PhD, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University. Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by two pamphlets, R x (sine wave peak, 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir "Long Time No See" (Periscope, 2015). She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, is published by Bloodaxe in 2016.

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