Lemonade Anemone

I’ve been writing poetry for about twenty years now, and I mostly write narrative poems. So, when I started going up to the Edinburgh Fringe in the late 2010s, I got really into the idea of producing long-form live literature shows.  The first show I wrote was called Skip, Skip, Skip , and it was an autobiographical, one-hour piece that I performed at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. It was a nostalgic and heartfelt show about music, friendships, and accidentally becoming a teenage goth in rural Norfolk in 2002.  I really loved the process of writing the show. I liked telling a cohesive story in a long-form, theatrical context – something I’d never done before – and I loved making something that really seemed to resonate with people. But I found the performance side of the process really challenging, especially having to learn an hour’s worth of words. My brain just doesn’t work like that, and the nerves really got to me.  Next time I write something like that, I thought to myself, I’ll writ

This year, I joined a writing collective called HOMEWORK. We meet once a month to decide on a writing prompt and share the poems we've put together over the previous thirty days.  It's been a game-changer for me, a real kick-up-the-arse for my poetry, and a way to give me the impetus to write something every month that I wouldn't normally write.  Last month, our prompt was oxymorons  so I decided to write about the bravery needed to admit your own cowardice.  The poem came out a bit dark, but maybe that’s the point…   Chicken Heart  This is the year of cowardice. Toad-belly pale and stagnant.  And I am yellow lichen, shade-quenched  and touch-starved. Soft as unexamined  unease. Better left unmentioned. Outside, my mother is dead-heading daisies,  bearing each wilting yellow flower in gentle, careful fingers. Chicken feather petals  falling at her feet.  I read somewhere that you can  hypnotise chickens with lines  drawn on pavements in chalk. God knows, I am a crime sc