catechism: poems for pussy riot

CATECHISM POEMS FOR PUSSY RIOT

Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe & Sophie Mayer, editors

In association with

COPYRIGHT Edited by Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer in association with English PEN

Copyright lies with The Authors (2012) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

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THANKS To all at English PEN, especially Jo Glanville, Cat Lucas, Robert Sharp, and Polly Roberts. For assistance in sourcing translators: Sarah Hesketh at Poetry Translation Centre; the Department of Russian at School of Slavonic and East European Studies. For commissioning poets: Gareth Evans, SJ Fowler, Richard Barrett, and Tim Wells. For logistics and support: Olivia Mayumi Moss (Shatterjapan) and Alisa Obratzsova (Pussy Riot legal team). Our translators into Russian: Andrei Aliaksandru, Vladimir Andreev, Marina Brodskaya, Chicago Translation Workshop, Elena Edwards, Tatiana Filimonova, Sophie Gug, Mary Harrah, Masha Karp, Svitlana Kobets, Sergei Korenevskiy, Nikolai Kozin, Maria Kozlovskaya, Dasha McLeish, Cat Paronjan, Tatiana Samsonova, Maria Shukurova, Dmitry Simanovsky, James Taylor, Jennifer Wilson, and John Wright. Acknowledgements for previous publications are listed in the back of the book.

Cover image: © Bobby Agrawal, drawn from self-portraits from the

authors and balaclava images by Mark Burnhope.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Editors’ Foreword Red Letter Day 1 George Szirtes Introduction 3 Sascha Aurora Akhtar Russian Songs 9 Sandra Alland Weapons of Minor Destruction 13 David Ashford ‘Maria pray Christ again’ 16 Tim Atkins I Love the Rich 17 Andrew Bailey Poem for Pussy Riot 21 Sirama Bajo A Mother Prays to Cipaltonal 22 Richard Barrett Manifesto #1 23 Susan Birchenough Pussy Love 25 Mark Burnhope Poem with Four Vaginal Walls 26 My Big Fat Social Model 26

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Wayne Burrows Ne (No) 27 David Caddy The Green Revolution 29 John Calvert They Spruce Themselves Up 30 Jen Campbell Vaginaland 31 Theodoros Chiotis Pussy Frankenstein 32 Karen Connelly ‘Here, my love, listen.’ 33 Jennifer Cooke Artsmear Again or Margarita Sane 35 Rebecca Cremin & Ryan Ormonde Six Objects for Pussy Riot 37 Sarah Crewe Sheela Na Gig (Deconstructed) 45 Sarah Crewe & Jo Langton v is for reVolution 46 Alison Croggon Dance of the Seven Veils 47 Tim Dooley Three Sisters 50

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Betty Doyle Women of the Year 52 Sasha Dugdale Perpetual 54 Laurence Ebersole Lyrical Catapult 56 Amy Ekins Pussy Got the… 57 Chris Emslie Elegy in Red 58 John Ennis For Nadia, Katya, Masha in Prison 59 Amy Evans Voice is a Prime Conduit Through 60 Gareth Evans Skylined 61 Katy Evans-Bush The Cage 63 SJ Fowler They 64 Kit Fryatt Sounds like Sense 71 Lucy Furlong Tricky D.I.S.C.O 72

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Charlotte Geater Avoid Using the Word ‘Pussy’ 73 The Gingerbread Tree This is a Free Riot 75 Jay Griffiths Hooligan Truth 76 Hel Gurney Old Rhymes: A Hypothetical Interview 78 Kiran Millwood Hargrave Pomegranates 79 Steven Heighton Vox Populi (A Poem for Voices) 81 Sophie Herxheimer & Alison Winch Trollops’ Cathedral 84 Sarah Hesketh Some Protest Stones 85 Jeff Hilson ‘With my Pussy Riot shorts on let me’ 87 Adam Horovitz The Blackbird 88 Ray Hsu The Numbers 89 Peter Hughes Poem 91

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Philo Ikonya & Helmuth Niederle Pussy Riot Forever: The Body 92 Dictators Never: Roll Call 93 Kirsten Irving Commentators Chewing Meat 96 Genowefa Jakubowska-Fijałkowska (trans. Marek Kazmierski) We Jew Women 97 Maria Jastrzębska Annunciation 98 Tom Jenks 50 Shades of Putin 99 Antony John ‘Grey skies with it, sailed through’ 101 Phill Jupitus Girl Banned 102 Amy Key Cat Power 103 John Kinsella Penillion for Pussy Riot 104 Melissa Lee-Houghton No Denial 106 Deborah Levy ‘Pussy Riot – let’s just tell it as it is’ 107 Ira Lightman Venus’ Hair 109

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Soutien-Gorge 109 Francesca Lisette PUSSY RIOT 4EVA 110 M. Lý-Eliot Punk Protection 112 Alex MacDonald Please Welcome to the Stage 113 Melissa Mack ‘The Dream. I woke up’ 114 Christodoulos Makris Sleepwalker on Stage 115 Aoife Mannix The Eye of the Needle 116 Barbara Marsh Hustera 117 Agnes Marton Extinct 118 Sophie Mayer All about Suffrage was Taught under Mrs Catt’s

Direction 119 Vagina 121 Sally McAlister The Queendom of Revolution 122 Michelle McGrane The Suitable Girl 124

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Michael McKimm The Wall 125 Drew Milne Microphonics 126 Helen Moore Cunt Magic 127 A.F. Moritz Lao Tzu’s Spear 128 Barbara Norden from Babylon 129 Redell Olsen Stuff Your Piney Whispers 133 Sandeep Parmar Propaganda 136 Anna Percy Inspired by Matisse’s ‘Blue Nude IV’ 138 Jody Porter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot 139 Frances Presley Mrs Pankhurst in Parliament 140 Karen Press Strange 141 Katy Price Accessories 143

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Ana Pulteney Pussy Riot Rap, August 2012 144 Chella Quint In Vogue 145 How to Make a Stencil 145 Red of The Vaginellas Fine Line 147 Selina Robertson ‘a pussy is a riot’ 148 Sophie Robinson Free Pussy 149 Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg You Are Here 150 Fathieh Saudi Theatre 151 John Siddique Thirst 153 Unwritten 154 Adrian Slatcher ‘Her Jazz’ for Pussy Riot 156 Daniel Sluman ‘Her face when she came’ 157 Ali Smith Song 158

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Barbara Smith Pair Bond 159 Tom Spencer Dear Pussy Riot 161 Jon Stone Подшлемниках (Balaclavas) 162 Andrew Taylor No New Items 163 Philip Terry from Inferno: Canto XXXIII 165 Sarah Thomasin To Vladimir Putin (Pussy Riot Poem) 168 Claire Trévien Abridged and Complete Biography of Olympe de Gouges 169 George Ttoouli Explicit 170 Gareth Twose from Top Ten Tyres Ltd 174 Jack Underwood Our Glorious Leader Putin 175 Steve Waling Mesostic: Prayer 177 Tony Walsh Because the Poets Know 178

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Michael Weller Ida Lupino Comix 180 Tim Wells Lucy Parsons 182 JT Welsch Prayer in Sickness 183 Ginna Wilkerson A Young Girl’s Dream 184 Alison Winch Cunt Haikus 185 Andrea Luka Zimmerman ‘Phil Ochs sang’ 186 Veronica Zundel Prayer and Pussy Riot Have Three Letters in Common 187 Letters from Pussy Riot 188 Contributors’ Biographies 190 Acknowledgements 206

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DEDICATION For Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova who sang:

Open all the doors, rip the stripes from your sleeve, and breathe with us our liberty.

translated by Sasha Dugdale

*

And I have faced the angry glare Of others, even my mother’s sons Who sent me out to watch their vines While I neglected all my own.

The Song of Songs 1.6,

translated by Marcia Falk

*

I would like to name them all but they took away the list and there’s no way of finding them. For them I have woven a wide shroud from the humble words I heard among them. I will remember them always, everywhere, I will never forget them, whatever comes.

Anna Akhmatova, from ‘Requiem,’

translated by Richard McKane

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DONATE

This e-book is distributed on the ‘pay what you think it is worth’ model. Any monies we receive will be split between the Pussy Riot Legal Fund and English PEN’s Writers at Risk programme. If your e-Reader supports hyperlinks, you can donate via the button above. Alternatively, you can visit this web page to give what you can: www.englishpen.org/poems-for-pussy-riot-ebook/

EDITORS’ FOREWORD Red Letter Day: Poetry and Protest for Pussy Riot Catechism: Poems For Pussy Riot is a communion of the visual and lyrical; rhymed, satirical and experimental poetry in tribute to political prisoners of conscience, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. It contains a cornucopia of approaches to freedom and to feminism, from opposing patriarchy to reclaiming pussy from a book of dirty words. It is an offertory for three women whose actions have woken up the need for change, in not just their own authoritarian state, but also in how we address gender politics and all forms of oppression in our own society. Featured poets include Alison Croggon, Amy Evans, Jeff Hilson, Tom Jenks, Amy Key, Agnes Marton, Michelle McGrane, Sophie Robinson, Andrew Taylor and 100 more. Summing up the work of 110 poets in 110 words is never easy – especially when the poets in question have donated their work rapidly and generously. Our anthology, which includes nearly 100 poems written especially for the band, has come together in under three weeks. What started as a conversation among four friends on Facebook, sparked by a post from EngPussyRiot that provided instructions on how to send letters to the band, has become a transnational conversation of hundreds powered by social media but driven by the same community and generosity among writers that informed the foundation of English PEN, who have supported this project practically and imaginatively from the beginning. Both the example set by Pussy Riot – fierce, feminist champions of freedom – and the example being made of them by the Russian judiciary has fired something in writers around the world. The band’s punk prayer uses language precisely and

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powerfully – and it’s inspired the poets who’ve contributed to do the same. They’ve taken risks in recognition of the real legal and physical dangers facing the Writers at Risk supported by PEN internationally. We have been overwhelmed by the wit, passion, elegance and variety of the poetic protests we’ve received. Some are funny, like Phill Jupitus’ puntastic ‘Girl Banned’ and Sophie Herxeimer’s short and sharp ‘Trollops’ Cathedral.’ Others are bold and angry, like Sophie Robinson’s vivid ‘Free Pussy’ and Tim Atkin’s extraordinary ‘I Love the Rich,’ which adapts a poem by Maria Tsvetaeva. Many poets, including Sirama Bajo, Steve Waling, JT Welsch and Veronica Zundel, have responded to the band’s Punk Prayer with their own new invocations. Sasha Dugdale wrote from Russia, Sally McAlister from France, and John Kinsella from Australia. Philo Ikonya, International PEN member, has been reading his roll call of unriotous dictators at events in Norway. The PEN blog, where around 45 of the poems have been posted, along with images of their poets in balaclavas, carried the message further than we could ever have imagined: offers of poems poured in, from poets such as seventeen year old activist Betty Doyle, and feminist performance poets Anna Percy, Ana Pulteney, Barbara Smith, and Sarah Thomasin – often with videos, such as Pulteney’s performance in her church in Totnes, Devon. Twenty-two poets who took part in SJ Fowler’s and Richard Barrett’s Poems for Pussy Riot events in London and Manchester shared their poems. The book, as you’ll see, even includes cut-out-and-wear poem-balaclava masks created by Mark Burnhope, and a stencil by Chella Quint so you can create your own Pussy Riot protest wherever you are. Please read, share, tweet, translate, remix, and keep our prayers for Pussy Riot’s freedom alive.

– Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer

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INTRODUCTION by George Szirtes An anthology of poems dedicated to a political purpose is not so much an anthology of poems as a political act in poetic form. There is a long history of such anthologies including 100 Poems Against The War, edited by Todd Swift at the time of the Iraq War in 2003, and, about ten years before that, Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia, edited by Ken Smith and Judy Benson. The two were different in that 100 Poems was an act of protest about a war in which the UK and US were the initiators and actors, whereas the second was to raise money for victims of a war faced by others, the contributing poets being helpless observers. The poets in Klaonica were not taking the Serbian or Bosnian or, for that matter, the Croatian side, but donating work to relieve suffering, much as they might donate money. These are many other causes in which poets might do the same – hospitals, libraries, celebrations, childhood and so forth – but from the political point of view 100 Poems and Klaonica represent the two main kinds. Catechism is of the second kind. It has been rapidly compiled by its editors to protest – from the outside, as it were – against the two-year sentence imposed on Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, three members of a much larger (twelve to fifteen members) punk band known as Pussy Riot, for staging a brief masked performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The performance, by five members of the band was quickly put up on YouTube and within eleven days, two of the band, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, were under arrest. Thirteen days later Samutsevich

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was also arrested. The two remaining members of the performing band have, it is presumed, gone abroad to avoid arrest. The song the band was singing at the time was a raucous prayer asking the Mother of God to chase away President Putin. The two-year sentence is due to be appealed on 1 October, 2012. Those are the bare facts but the cause of Pussy Riot is more complex than that. In the first place the performance was about President Putin personally, and articulated a desire to see him leave the political stage. Who is Putin? Russians in general have mixed feelings about him. The period straight after the fall of the Soviet Union in President Gorbachev’s time, was followed by a few chaotic years under President Yeltsin. Those years were wounding and humiliating for a people that had felt stable and, in many respects, proud of their role in the Second World War as well as on the international stage afterwards. The Soviet Union with its Warsaw Pact was an equal and opposite force to the United States and NATO. A good part of those who remembered the pre-Gorbachev era, before the dismemberment of the Soviet empire, looked back to those times with a certain nostalgia, because, despite the gulags, despite the secret arrests, despite the censorship, despite the increasing corruption, they felt safe. Given Russia’s history, their feelings about authoritarianism were and remain very different from our feelings about individual freedoms in Europe and the West. The ‘strong hand’ – inevitably a patriarchal hand – was something many trusted. When Putin came along offering just that in a new form in a world of oil and oligarchs, he seemed to them welcome. Anything but the madness under Yeltsin!


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But that opinion is clearly not universal in Russia. A good many people have strong fears of the establishing of a new, more corrupt, one-party state in which the state itself is the largest oligarch, a state in which notions of ‘tradition’ are imposed on those who, for very good reason, wish to free themselves from it. Putin is an individual, the most powerful individual in the state, but Pussy Riot’s performance, as I read it, was not only about Putin – it was also a protest against the kind of power Putin symbolises. This includes the Russian Orthodox church. The church has an important role in maintaining Putin’s power since it represents a very large conservative constituency in Russia, one that somehow survived the officially atheist Soviet period to prosper after it. The church is an alternative embodiment of the ‘strong hand’ Putin can employ to influence and control the Russian electorate, which is why the performance, including the reference to the Mother of God, took place in a major Moscow church closely associated with Putin. The church is, necessarily, patriarchal. And the patriarchy – both formal and informal in terms of the family and society generally – is clearly important to a band calling itself Pussy Riot. The performance was, in those terms, a call for female solidarity and rebellion against a state of affairs where Putin’s masculinity is a highly constructed point of appeal. Jack Underwood has a poem in this anthology that comically highlights precisely this aspect of Putin’s power: Putin the macho man, Putin who offers or denies you the power because he not only knows best, but has the means to effect his will. Pussy Riot is a highly intelligent form of resistance to such will: it is a call to disobedience.

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Since Putin seems assured of the power, it is rather surprising that the courts should have decided to act as severely as they did. Intended primarily for home consumption, as a warning, the charge and sentence, has been entirely counter-productive in international terms. The charge of ‘hooliganism’ is rather like the one of ‘parasitism’ that was directed at the Nobel Prize winning poet, Josef Brodsky in 1964. It is broadly seen as a charge of convenience. In that sense Pussy Riot has grown from a minor nuisance to a global cause. They are up there with Brodsky. A crushing and oppressive two-year sentence becomes very big news. The result is that Pussy Riot look, as they actually are, highly intelligent while Russia looks cruel and stupid. * For people on this side of the equation the issue is not so much with Putin as with what Putin represents and what Pussy Riot represent. The meaning of Pussy Riot, for many, is, as evidenced in the poems published here, less a political incident, more a cross-section of contemporary concerns and passions symbolised by the three young women. The meanings of Pussy Riot in this context begin with what the name suggests, that’s to say feminism in its various forms and moods, from assertion of rights, through core issues of identity, down to protest at an inimical, oppressive male world. This meaning – probably the most intense meaning – involves a conception of the world that is the polar opposite of Putin’s. Then again, since Pussy Riot calls itself, and performs as, a punk band, the meaning of the group is derived from and invites a punk aesthetic that is partly tribal, partly anarchic, looking to be disruptive of conservative views and manners, in exactly the same way as Pussy Riot were disruptive in the church.


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Beyond that, the band is young: there is also the invitation to youth. It is not precisely an old-versus-young battle but, in this case, it is the young, masked and loud, who are in the vanguard. For many they represent the potential for a new and different model of Russia. Each of these models and antitheses is crude in itself – life, we know, is more subtle than that – but the antitheses remain. Most importantly, trumping all other concerns, is a conception of justice. It is simply wrong to jail people for that length of time for the minor office of disruption. Three unjustly accused individuals stand against a state led by a former operative of the KGB, a state that has seen the arrest and assassination of vocal opponents. In many ways it is like the old days: the repressive state against its dissidents. The corrupt system against those who protest its corruption. * The anthology contains a variety of poems, some, like Andrew Bailey’s, the second of Mark Burnhope’s, Rebecca Cremin and Ryan Ormonde’s, Tim Dooley’s, John Ennis’s, Charlotte Geater’s, Jay Griffth’s and others (the list is too long and I am going alphabetically) address the case directly or refer to it obliquely. More numerous are poems that are born out of a sympathetic feeling, identifying something in Pussy Riot that corresponds with the feeling of the poet in respect of feminism or authority or sheer voice quality. There may be earlier poems now grown particularly relevant. There are poems that appear on a larger map of concerns that happen to find themselves here. There are poems of various styles including Alison Croggon’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,’ Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Perpetual,’ SJ Fowler’s ‘They,’ Kit Fryatt’s ‘Sounds Like Sense,’ Sarah Hesketh’s sharp ‘Some Protest Stones,’ Philo Ikonya and

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Helmuth A. Niederle’s ‘Pussy Riot For Ever: The Body,’ Amy Key’s ‘Cat Power,’ John Kinsella’s ‘Penillion for Pussy Riot,’ Aoife Mannix’s ‘The Eye of the Needle,’ and so on. I don’t pick these out because I think they are the best poems, only because they are broadly different. I could pick many others. Like any contributor to such anthologies, I am fully aware that it is unlikely to affect the course of events in any measurable way, though it may perhaps add to the weight of protest that hopes, at some stage, on some level, to influence the Russian court and indeed that part of the Russian people who support the sentence. It might be a consolation to Pussy Riot, and to those for whom they speak, that there are many people – including poets – who listen to them and talk back in support. A book of poems in a foreign language published in a foreign place is rarely a factor in the decisions of a hostile administration, but this is downloadable. It may be a factor somewhere, somehow. Who can tell? One has hope or one has nothing. Speaking personally it is quite odd for me as an almost sixty-four year old male poet to be writing this introduction. It was odd, but rather nice to be asked on the spur of the moment and to say: yes. Of course I wondered if I was out of place. I am not looking to be cool with those younger than me or of a different gender. I have been on a few demonstrations but have never felt it to be my natural place. I ask myself this: if the world were arrayed into forces represented by President Putin on the one side and Pussy Riot on the other I know which side I’d be on and it wouldn’t be Putin’s. That’s where we are, and that’s where this is. And that is why it is a privilege to write this introduction

—George Szirtes


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SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR Russian Songs Russian Song I Maybe is guess so is the night removed from plain I can taste a kiss in my mouth like zaum apples. Girl Child of the Eighties Freeze frame screen kiss Hot heads under silent wigs – Bauhaus, ‘She’s in Parties’ Twisty-furled Yellow-balled put on throat clunk foot me geesy face Matt plays the drums I put my necklace on like Barbie I sit pink and delicious rockstarangelfacebridaldreamglowpeachesandcream My First Twirly Curls I had ‘em all

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Magic girl I am ‘em all butterfly chair Pomegranate lair I is spent I lose my hair like crayons in a box of crayons lined up each color, each color I line up Freeze Fry Fist Dried First Born Unborn child eyes crys eyes crys I crack up I cat, I bat (fruit) Russian Song II We are all hoping to write like We are all hoping to write like Stars I know what you want Gosh is there anything Chinar you can’t do Yes, I can’t roll cigarettes


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Russian Song III Everything is a cycle If it’s not yours anymore It’s happening To someone else Bessmyslitza! Breaking Up Is Hard To Do Aaah – Jesus Lizard It is too hot to taste sweat do you remember I can hide things in my body metal bars under skin horns you notice lace & decompose take a needle & paint or recombine

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difference if you were meek I didn’t notice is this your story Let’s talk electric. Russian Song IV Oberiu, I think it is interesting that Sauce sucked off olive pits Ju-ju like a cigar you don’t smoke (I love you) Untitled My girlfriend’s sex Is jealous It wants the extension The lift, the pull Of mine.


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SANDRA ALLAND Weapons of Minor Destruction

All the people like me are thanking all the people like you. – Eileen Myles i/ She tells them/ quiet: I practise my tears no fear my scowl my laugh even in my passport photo. Even in my mug shot. Thank you for the cake. All the people like me/ are thanking all the people like you. ii/ We’re patched together daily by hands both Pakistani and Scottish. For eight days we’ve been searched and split/ me to a windowless room

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her to show the jury her soft-shoe. Her soft- est parts. at night Greek music Polish food Spanish weed Plates balance like justice in the waitress’ hands. When I say justice I mean relief. iii/ On Princes Street they’re recruiting teenagers to kill Afghans and the prosecutor asks me: What language were you speaking when he attacked? I speak as dream-self in the courtroom, draped in/ skirt, earrings, blouse, girlish charm. The brief power of Anglophone eyelash batted from white face. I can’t breathe but I tell my love: Dinnae nivir give up. It’s from the text our Glaswegian trans friend sent and I figure she knows the archeology/of hope. Aye, says my love/ meaning yes.


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Aye. Her Venezuelan tongue baptizing the word.

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DAVID ASHFORD ‘Maria pray Christ again’ Maria pray Christ again play punk in that temple where the word is a stone on my tongue!


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TIM ATKINS I Love the Rich Translated from the poem by Maria Tsvetaeva You can see the contempt God has for money by the kind of people he gives it to – Alexander Pope Let me state from the outset that What we have in common is almost fuck all We being the 99% Gathering wherever there is most horror in this world We –

Humans / mothers / fathers Written off / Beneath their greasy wheels Inhaling the greenback gas that sparks from their arses – This is my message Wherever there are pencils / pussys / golden arches / Or gulag Oh how I LOVE THE RICH For their contempt for the truth That all humans are equal For their glass eyeballs That shine & see nothing For the shit that their wretched parents shovelled them & which they will in turn shovel into their kids For their hands movement in & out Of everyone’s coat Pockets I LOVE THE RICH For their sad vowel sounds & bitter consonants

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For the way they slide out – For having Bulldozed our public spaces / schools / faces – & because – Their kidneys & store-bought livers overflow with dystopia & chips I LOVE THE RICH For the secretaries / lackeys / & personal assistants Signed up to spread their STDS & misinformation Asking how many days they have left to live in Standing in for them at the Pissing contest Fucking & fighting without love or emulsion & because in all their methods of procreation – Bored / gilded / & wadding I – MARINA TSVETAEVA – AM UNTOUCHABLE In spite of their dilapidated corpulence Unbleached & organic private school anal cocaines bitch Slap & occasional ticket Dog-faced / Almost-dawn Nocturnal admissions of doubting… Concerning the core of their Values & gravitates WHAT IS TO BE DONE? I proclaim


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That Among all the misbegotten & cast-out Mothers animals or insects Nowhere else are there Such orphans upon this earth We all breathe in their fucked-up Quasi-christian school-of-hard-knocks University-of-life homilies & bloodclot In the suburbs of their palaces Bunga-bunga Bukkake & excuses Like a cockroach with shit on its boots Walks over the surface of perfection – For all of these things – When one of them comes to me with A noose round his neck & an orange Mumbling about his “needs” & his “roots” – I hold my negative capability up against his

essential emptiness – & Well I Well I

– you can hear me mumbling something – I swear it See & This is my method When one’s heart is steeped in compassion No dissention can bring disruption Inviolable / Untouchable / Interconnected

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I swear it My practice is this – TO – REALLY – REALLY – LOVE THE RICH 30.IX.1922 / 23.VIII.2012


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ANDREW BAILEY Poem for Pussy Riot O presidential hands, that can break tigers and bend frying pans, you know from judo too much force may be revisited on its source.

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SIRAMA BAJO A Mother Prays to Cipaltonal do not go out, daughter they do not like your flesh, here they seek to harm it, here cover yourself, for you will be seen do not go out, daughter, be still you will not be sacrificed today not in the darkness, never in the dark for how will they see it? daughter, your flesh has grown how, so much of it, will we hide? darkness’ shawl is not enough daughter, your flesh is glowing in the dark I will sing a very old song thick like war, like grief from our dead, this gift a song to cover up the sun birds will think it is always night we will have the stars in cactus blooms always safe your female flesh which used to darkness, has begun to glow


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RICHARD BARRETT Manifesto #1 1. Forget what you were going to write 2. Forget that you were going to write anything 3. Remember that you’re due to meet Cheralyn in an hour 4. Forget where 5. Remember you have no intention of learning to drive, ever 6. Forget what it was like before Tesco Metro opened down the road 7. Forget what you tried to remember but forgot again, then 8. Remember it 9. Forget the trip to the theatre you made together 10. Remember the theatre 11. Forget the thrill of united effort 12. Remember the placard and the precise wording 13. Forget that writing is not enough 14. Remember saying what you wanted and not fearing the consequences 15. Forget that God exists 16. Forget you forgot that, but 17. Remember freedom of religious observance 18. Remember entertainment and uphold it as the principle of principles 19. Remember your passport 20. Remember your Euros 21. Forget the time delay meaning writing and doing are different and always will be 22. Remember how pointless it felt reading poetry when your city was on fire 23. Remember the good feeling following the demo in support of local businesses 24. Forget politics 25. Remember entertainment

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26. Forget your first degree; erase it from history; conspire with the others who’d rewrite history as the history they want 27. Remember the ambition of political poetry and political art 28. Forget entertainment 29. Forget turning history into a ‘good night out’ 30. Forget how all things have at their root economics 31. Remember what Cheralyn said about this that time 32. Remember reading Man at Leisure on the train home from Ely 33. Forget ‘living poetically’, though 34. Remember it again, a moment later 35. Forget those without the luxury of ‘living poetically’ 36. Forget writing 37. Remember writing 38. Forget, even, how to write 39. Forget, also, why one should write


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SUSAN BIRCHENOUGH Pussy Love there’s a saying in my village when a pussy screams the world wakes up there’s a saying in my village if you fuck with an angry pussy you won’t have a ball

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MARK BURNHOPE Poem with Four Vaginal Walls Punk rings with pink and also clink. We play clink so get secure punk. Rum-n-raisin licks passion pink. Pretty in pink trumps petty in punk. Prank contracts gag and catfish stink. Poems: pearls to light reception swine. Reception desks bevel under poems. Pussy is on the prowl over the table. The prowl is on the table over pussy. Poems contribute paper skins to the constitutions of water. Christian Slater resembles crushing slaughter. My Big Fat Social Model We’re going to need bigger balaclavas thanks to all these hydrocephalus kids crawling around the embassy like it’s Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest latrine. We would never stereotype the band wagon jumpers (imagine some of them jumping a bandwagon, for one). But we just cannot have them hijacking every ism.


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WAYNE BURROWS Ne (No) after Otakar Petrina/Zdenek Rytir, 1969 I’d buy all the Pacific, and the other seas besides, with storms and hurricanes scattered here and there. I’d build a house on the deepest ocean’s floor if it meant I’d be clear of this country’s shores where fear rules and false accusations are bold. Does anyone here want to live in that world? No. I’d buy spring sky and the beauty of all its stars, with wind sometimes, on its journey home. I’d build my castle walls on a foundation of clouds and hope by some miracle it wouldn’t fall. This country is ruled by fear, kills innocence. Would anyone here want to return to this? No. But I’d find the sea lanes are guarded by warships, carrying tons and kilos of bullets and bombs. If I went under, deeper, submarines would plunge and soon find my home in the water-caves. In the sky are airplanes and satellites, as you know - is there anywhere, then, where I might go? No. So we’re all caged here, and keep ourselves quiet, but might sail out, sometimes, under camouflage. Should we be grateful that we’re granted permission to live? That if we just say nothing, we’ll be left in peace?

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Fear rules this place, false accusations grow bold. Does anyone here want to remain in this world? No. Note: ‘Ne (No)’ was recorded by the Czech singer Marta Kubisova in 1969 but left unreleased until 1990. Kubisova’s outspoken opposition to the ‘normalisation’ process after the 1968 invasion led to her being banned from performing, recording or travelling in 1970, a ban that remained in place until 1990. Throughout this period she continued to be a key dissident voice and was one of the first signatories of Charter 77.


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DAVID CADDY The Green Revolution And lo a hand was sent look look the roll of book this fleshy hand put to wing posted, viral rowdy bodies, broil lewd archways side splitting non-habitus solar plexus encounters clapped my hands and cried out at this fiery flying thing feather breath full silk scarf bond sex shiver tube seepage overturn sprawl dislocation after curbs thoughtless slips crawl missing / not missing flagrant dyed hair visible tendrils together

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JOHN CALVERT They Spruce Themselves Up after Goya They spruce themselves up They spruce themselves up It’s the dregs of the world being poured from a cup They spruce themselves up They spruce themselves up It’s the claw and the nail it’s the driven in deep It’s the raw and the roar, it’s the curve and the steep It’s the witch and the bitch and the whore and the hag Its an icon, an emblem, a slogan, a flag They spruce themselves up They spruce themselves up Throwing you to the dogs As they sell you a pup It’s the crash, it’s the clash, it’s the steel, it’s the flesh It goes over the fence, it gets into the mesh It’s a party, a bureau, a government, a state It’s a doorway, a barrier, a border, a gate They spruce themselves up They spruce themselves up It’s the knife and the spanner Designed to disrupt It’s a shrine and an abattoir, I.D. and blacked-out car Index ICBM Three chords, the power of ten One fist, another shout One kick, another out They spruce themselves up They spruce themselves up And the impact zone falls Between heart and the gut


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JEN CAMPBELL Vaginaland The girl stands and opens her mouth until it is the same size as her body. Her eyes are purple. She has words to fire out from deep inside of her, and they are blue. They are raw. She has been baked as a blackberry pie and now everyone wants a piece of her. The girl says she can sit behind some half-broken window and turn herself inside out. They gape. Purple roots like the capitals of countries. She says: this is the capital of me.

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THEODOROS CHIOTIS Pussy Frankenstein Bless this twenty four-eye machine chanting: ‘What man dare, I dare.’ Guitar chords, breastbones of kingfishers & jays are its defence mechanisms. The totem transubstantiates into balaclavas in this mythology of face: soldier-warriors chant. We are going viral. Like certain Amazon tribes we have only three numbers: ‘one,’ ‘two’ & ‘many.’ You will find out soon enough.


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KAREN CONNELLY ‘Here, my love, listen.’ 1. Here, my love, listen. The sculpted dish of the human ear still fills with cries from a road where the blood stayed for many days. The people come slowly out of their hiding places to collect the scarves, the purses, the hand-painted signs, so many voices broken away from frozen-open mouths. 2. Here where all the doors are closed the woman turns herself sideways to slide through the slit of hope, the woman strips off her shadow and stands perfectly naked before the crowd. Then she begins to sing. 3. Here where the spirit becomes flesh and a million dead sweat beside you, the borders dissolve with the bruised skin. Here there is no separation. Entering the new age

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of murder, you forsake every weapon but the hand thrashing a guitar. And the voice, the unruly voice, raising its riot of song.


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JENNIFER COOKE Artsmear Again or Margarita Sane what is to be done / with a vapid limit urn? that it might be crossed out completely? the spatial dynamics now are just-so boxy, lacking a rim: they work on grid systems we all recognise as held inside the head without soft metaphors what is to be stated / to an anti livid rump? that it might be able to read it’s a cunt outside, the poets try matching to make up meaning but it’s the acting up of making that can invaginate us this hour power lines cut out history pictures yet our cut ups are history too, our cast offs out this hour anew to think, to see beauty in colour streaks to fully reject when rival mind it up or a phallic’s vivid nod: we wish fulfil to cut it off, short.

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In its place, make surefire typos demanded & delivered by the few we need to feel, & time’s sharp but still linear for hope


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REBECCA CREMIN & RYAN ORMONDE Six Objects for Pussy Riot

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A it happened in a church


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B this is an awkward act

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C


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D a bright monochrome dress

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E


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F a beautiful nude woman in an alluring pose

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as an action on 29/08/2012 in London as an action by Rebecca Cremin and Ryan Ormonde * RC and RO stand facing forward RC wears C attached to her pussy RO wears D RC wears headphones RC listens RC says aloud repeatedly either A or B in Russian for 30 seconds RC watches RO RC is not allowed to deviate from this routine RO looks RO either says aloud A in English or says aloud B in English or performs E as a series of gestures or performs F as a gesture RO watches RC RO is allowed to deviate from this routine having performed A, B, E and F once RO may not deviate from performing A, B, E and F RC stops action after 5 minutes


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SARAH CREWE Sheela Na Gig (Deconstructed) sh sssshhhhush hush be silent be shy be viol(at)et(ed) she (s)he be sub-ordinate be ordinary be absolutely

unordained be (house) trained be shamed be shamanistic be sure of sham/ lust definitive ee disgust/discussed/disco(urse) /dancing la la-la-la-la-la song scale balance justice just this

singing na no/not/notre dame/our lady/lady/mary/mari/flower/(pussy)willow gig there is music there are muses there is movement

there is riot

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SARAH CREWE & JO LANGTON v is for reVolution


47

ALISON CROGGON Dance of the Seven Veils FIRST she is humble and unworthy she dare not she is diseased her eyes dilate her fingers bleed her mouth simmers with juice she cannot contain herself she spills modestly into the word contingent as a virus in the corpse of god SECOND she locks her mouth fast on the mouth of a man his pen rivers her blood over the margins of god’s book THIRD she is an ear wet with song she is a cunt swollen with god’s glory she is an eye blistered with light she is skin split by goading kisses she is a stomach parched to ecstasies she rakes off her hair she is the pure sex tolling through cavities of blood FOURTH she understands how walls melt in desire’s conflagration

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FIFTH she sees her lover perfected in death rising to take her perfectly unbodied kiss in his bloodied mouth his dessicated skin pearls and floods with the salty waters of her many tongues SIXTH she is cast into her freedom her voice infects the cloistered ear her tumescence returns she sleeps slimed with sweat her tears o’erspill the nightmare chalice her lips rot her hands blaze with putrefaction her stink fills the chapel with penitents she is all parasite ingesting her own juices her belly bloats and ulcers with the fruit of god she cries love in the crowded streets she is untouchable SEVENTH she burns on the pyre built letter on letter by god’s faithful servants her blood boils her eyeballs burst her bones crack and char


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naked at last in god’s great darkness

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TIM DOOLEY Three Sisters I did go to Moscow, Yekaterina says, to stand in the cathedral and sing a jagged song against the Patriarch, the fixer the smooth word and the suit. I did go to Moscow, says Maria Alyokhina, because we’re trained from childhood to forget the child’s unwelcome question. I did go to Moscow, Nadezhda also says, because work is not enough to burst the corporate gangsters’ smugness; we must speak as holy fools. Unshielded protectors, dance and stamp your feet; stomp and shout your song until your words drown out the limousine-driven cross, the cassock and the boot.


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© Mark Burnhope

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BETTY DOYLE Women of the Year Naked and pale; A bare breast. I have a body that is a piece of art, A piece of meat, A piece of ass that he can sink his teeth into. I am too opinionated, uneducated, Bra-burner, man hater, castrator. I am a bitch. I am a little living doll For you to under estimate: Just a girl for you to dominate. Hold my hand, I fall on my own. Mirrors and camera flashes mock me, Mannequins and magazine covers are my antithesis, My mortal sin. Lead me by example, by the waist; Call me sweetie, fear my art. ‘Stay away,’ I say But of course it’s a lie – I am a sweet sixteen anarchist, Never been kissed, Feminist. I won’t be used, abused, Screwed over. Scrape me under your boot, throw me in a cell,


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Try to silence me, try to tell me A vagina is not a good thing to have.

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SASHA DUGDALE Perpetual When all the passions are at last spent They lead out the mother martyrs Who honestly have the most to lose Having regurgitated soul, heart and brains At some earlier stage, having sent a pigeon-chested Yellow parcel of skin forth into the dung. They are more parts water than anyone else: Tears rush to blur their eyes at the smells of Jasmine, milk, meadowsweet, bread. Every night they fight a constricting doubt Winding itself about their neck, chewing, pawing Severing important arteries and nervous structures: Every night in their sleep they are closer to dying Than the rest, because with one act they have become two And they perceive their own death always from outside As a halving, a terrible halving, with a sharpened sword.


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© Mark Burnhope

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LAURENCE EBERSOLE Lyrical Catapult Catapult: To leap suddenly William Blake’s cats – were tigers burning bright in the forests of the night Picasso’s cats warned of Guernica, Guernica, already too much night Zapatista cats bear hooded-eyes, hooded-eyes for all Chiapas – invisible Grand Inquisition cats still wear Guantanamo eyes, Guantanamo lies – despicable Stalin’s cats all went blind – Stalin’s cats went all-blind indiscriminate – too dangerous to talk about – to talk about Pussy Riot for the 98% are not felines – not felines purring to elite command, never purring to elite demand – Pussy Riot sing civil – never violent (Oh loving pussy/Oh lyrical pussy/ Oh loving pussy/Your put away/ Your sent far away/By the two percent/Oh pussy prisoner pussy/ You know the way/You know your way, our way of the 98%)


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AMY EKINS Pussy Got the... slack words lax words lack words to crack across the screen to whip-snap sibilance to scream cream obscene regime cream I’ll say it cream because I can cream take it to mean what you want cream Sheila whips the cream Sheila whips and screams Sheila’s whips and creams it’s okay... here

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CHRIS EMSLIE Elegy in Red There is a yellowness that becomes a city. Must we again speak only to our shoes on the metro, scratching through wormy dark that is not a metaphor for anything. The cry flushes red to the lips, out of the shattering to the irrefutable call. Here: these are our last furs, our vespers, the stirred mid-air in which songs range under a street lamp.


59

JOHN ENNIS For Nadia, Katya, Masha in Prison What you did is the best icon for our times For the Galilean, lost in credal factions, arguments over bread Who strode in like yourselves, – Hooligan, – caused a riot in

the temple, For that droopy-eyed female of the males his mother’s long

become For self-serving artists lusting after finance from the sanctuary, Mary calling her other kids after revolutionaries the Romans

killed. But when you climbed up under them to punk on the altar The Blasphemer understood. His apostle Voltaire lingers still – I will defend to the death your right to say what you will – He might have added where, and if they could sing it all the

better For Putin, Kirill caught up in their own whirlwind, But you three will endure, caged forever in the mind Crushed now to apologise. Nor will he matter, Nikiforov, Nadia will, and Gera, lost these dark days for her love.

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AMY EVANS Voice is a Prime Conduit Through


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GARETH EVANS Skylined risen angels of your own unfettered nature the church inside you rings its own believing orthodoxy of the human need the deeper bell the brighter gleam the free puttin’ you down does nothing less than roar the riot wider it is its own un/ masking you your countless trinity listen kitten? who’s the lion now

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© Mark Burnhope


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KATY EVANS-BUSH The Cage Inside it are the most beautiful animals of all. The most dangerous animals. The most vulnerable animals. The ones with the most coloured plumage. The ones with stripes. The ones with the loudest songs. Outside it are the ones who might be hurt. Our eyes are burned by colour. Our flesh is torn by claws. Our ears are troubled by the untrammelled cacophony of nature. Our cameras – In the dust of the enclosure, in the pen, the caged cat paces, darkly miraculous inside her suit of cat skin. The squid-woman swims oblivious in light and water. Behind the wall, the rhino nurses her infant, innocent even of her horn.

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SJ FOWLER They they are ten days a month they weep under the name they don’t know nothing about they hide nails in socks they buy gifts in numbers for those they’ve never met they eat filthy food in public they scream until dawn they teach the tailor to turn to ash into fabric they are Jews, nothing of childhood they are running a headscarf over a hundred skulls of stone they are free to queue short strawhair they are free to recommend the free unscrews they are at the catacombs they are expecting us four down there they are the innocent need to travel they are finished over on a board upon the sacred fat they are that which keeps in pretty pattern they know you’re important, they’ve seen it they are everywhere this week but will not be they are the night begging me to ask you to leave they are living in Princess Diana’s favourite treehouse they are polishing turds they are a diamond birdhouse they are the smell of bruges they are oysters they are a dead bird shitting on you they are bad luck they are the tree that is always considered female they are hunger become the uncomfortable silence they are what is born they are often a couch


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they are easier eaten they might be open to what happy marriage is they are unlikely to get better here they are obscure neighborhood doctors who are ever touching

the tits of their female patients they are the unfortunate ones who have to open their legs they are Rabota they are Rab they are Sarah they are Daniel at the lake they are the second twin they swear we shall meet one day they will be swollen they bathe in being the reliable woman they angle under hypnosis they dare not say ‘2nd twin’ they are three times with a hook, because it is gone they recede into a void of women lost they are excavated & unembarrassed they are content in you they were a family credible of enormous empathy they are the Vel d’Hiv & its neighbours in desire they are weeping in the secret spaces they were hiding beneath furniture they know the neutrality of being in forgiveness they were the wealth of selling, the rifle and its bullets they are the pliers she quiets crying to cleave a joint from its

shoulder they are my first they are a welcome back to the Island they lay our table they tell me to let go they are oriental buildings twinned with towers they open a zipper they wear a light blue patterned material they smell contents, of nature, unknown

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they eat the fruit they sing a song they have a gratefulness that we were prepared ourselves to

live abroad and not be cowards when young they were the first seen in a series of picture books they are called ’the day of wrath’ they watched him fall past our window, in pleasure they having waited for some kind of comeuppance they are a lifetime in business and then illness they are my wife, when she has twins in her belly they are implied even in their usual appearance they are Cordelia and Ophelia they sweat the entire lower body as a costume for women they the suits that resemble them they are swollen bellies they transfer a plot from London to Moscow they are further south they are from men to women, to women & woman they pull teeth like nuts in a turtle’s jaw they will not be caught imagining the sea they are upon entry they are the careful end to breath they are hallucinations of two ends to one life they are well being rotten to a core they have treatment that doesn’t matter they are one they are restrained when interfering they take pills they are already gone, on the day of living they are the family I have chosen they are the lost lady on the map that isn’t even on the map they ask if we can explain why our revolutionary poets are not

censored by our government? they ask whether it is because, at Cambridge they share their

bread with politicians’ sons? they are five


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they are wooden boats set on fire they are vampire bats they are the finest education they are lambs wool greased with lard they bait ferrets with goose livers they complain of their partner’s taste in cinema they are the recent purge they are poets playing guitars to write novels they are poor crisps on their bent they have been hungry they will never resurrect Mao they are never in a fight they paint their bust with cobweb puff they have not time to say they are militant poetics they have eaten bricks they see the sun is up they are now further from the drip they must be too thick to understand they are proudly overweight they are young bearded they are frightened by the breeze they are defenders of death they are the last knightly brotherhood of Vikings they are sons and daughters of washing machine magnates they are the Sudan sun reflection coming down they are circled, circling, as the middle one, too defined for the

rest of us they say random words they are the palliation of the gentles without politics they will FSB you and then you’ll know no one is listening they know the only defence is head down / hands up they say we didn’t do it because we couldn’t have done it they are a filial son would in good conscience they purchase their parents coffin long before it is needed they know how it was done in Murmansk they & Andrei Nekrasov

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they say it was I that began to cease learning when the coffin lid closed

they had an inordinate affection for coffins, having them laid out waiting for months, even years, before death

they are elders sleeping in preparation. they are an act of great merit they offset evil deeds they purchase coffins for the poor who could not afford their

own they believe in apes they are Slavic destination they are not the return of Stalin they are Voltaire they knew Peter the Great tortured his son to death they are consultant to a company whose vice president was

arrested by the German police for laundering Columbian drug money

they are the arid admiration of ignorance they are salons filling up with Catherine II they are the private ceremony for the legion of honour they are a mirage that rots before it ripens they ask how do I destroy an opponent? they reply, steal his metal they know in what kind of shame we live they are the Germans feeding us they have long standing ties to the intelligence community they depart for new camps of clover and flower where the food

will be a free salute they come with me they find something else to talk about they are little fur patching monkeys and they are steel bars that seem like a father who stops a bloody

fight to remind his sons they are brothers they are where Germans come to drink beers and easy women

sell their bodies


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they were the dogs who perched like an eternity figured by the present day, as yet, unfinished by evening.

they are the deer as fear itself beneath its branching stone they the people’s outfits that astonish they are where the people stroll with mindless frowns, while

the Germans glow with health. they are the dark glance of a swan – wintry all over, its beak

orange-black as a thicket in autumn they the want to seize the lyre bird’s tail, strike its strings, and

sing of Russian heroism. they are the monkeys variously angry and displaying their

variegated bottoms, and seem, except for the sad ones and shy ones, eternally irritated by the presence of man.

they are the agile bears scrambling up and looking down, waiting for their keepers’ orders

they are where bats hang upside down, like the heart of a present-day Russian.

they the egg that gets tired of roaring. they are where an Eskimo husky vents its Siberian aggression

in a hostile ritual born in the blood, at the sight of a kitten washing its face.

they are here they are a black seal hobbling along the ground on its long

flippers, moving like a man tied up in a sack they are where lions lie dreaming, their heads on their paws. they are where the golden tuft of a certain bird displays a fire

whose power belongs only to those who have sworn eternal virginity.

they are where a rhinoceros’ red and white eyes hold all the unquenched fury of an overthrown emperor. Alone among animals he shows his disdain for humans as if they were slaves in revolt. In him lurks the spirit of Ivan the Terrible.

they are for the tattered dead they are pens in hands

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they are hands covering their tea they those lupins stretching like limbs they will have no time for cleaning they are a good ear they do synchronised swimming they medal in July they adorn the dresser they are the spare room they are a maisonette in Seville they are glad today we are in Oslo they with those who can never exist except but when upon

their facades they are glad there is nothing here to compare me to they or else I could speak now of half my life or what of it was

they had on to take off they are my boys’ clothes they the return of the taxidermist they are her matching soft ribbons they are her 3 ribbons on each twin they are the two for the hair they are the ones wrapped about the hips they are the red ribbons in bathwater they are pecking a wind up rooster they were sold in some tacky tourist store in Vigo they my stiff grass they are my holidays alone they are those that caused suspicion they are my daughters drunk they are leaning too close to me they lewdly grin the silence into a vault they the pious ground I despise they are where the longer I know my kids the less friendly they

become they confer & decide to stop pretending


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KIT FRYATT Sounds Like Sense or, ship

out to my cabin in the woods! chick studies

the moonlight is paper ash European feuilletons

on the steep pitch shingles harpy

we’ll be of good cheer are gagging

light a candle goes ape

burn summons for political

and charge self confident female hip-hop

climb into on YouTube

the loft and keek the body is a ravishing

rapt out at the stars instrument

drumming starving burning sperm in alum

comfortless and unallayed or, hope in any other words

in the morning our house will have got up on its stilts and walked a mile.

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LUCY FURLONG Tricky D.I.S.C.O

Ms Baubo

She trickster

dances Demeter across pulsing boards,

mirror ball snow glints against sparkled balaclava,

a stretched red sequined boob tube over laughing torso, her

regulars stand at the bar, laugh & point, expect her usual grin

not bare-faced cheek covered with dead-pan expression, as

she spins a mourning goddess across her lit-up floor.

Hades keeps mothers in the underworld, under here

their heads push against the ceiling, engaged,

waiting for the earth to open like a womb,

to contract, push them gasping into

spring air, bloody, beautiful

un-bowed. Baubo reveals

herself to Demeter;

teases a

thaw.


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CHARLOTTE GEATER Avoid Using the Word ‘Pussy’ feminists it’s time to become angry again! gingerbread women break your fists when they say the punk rock girl band / stop bitching whose name we can’t say / i call them bitches on morning television / because they are bitches three strumpets who will / holy mary mother of god be pardoned soon the girls are sinners, they’ve made their choice against christ & real madonna what pussies, when riots? but which of you weren’t always angry – who listened / stop bitching little heart elbow patches are used only because they’re hard to take seriously. everyone can be pussy riot? but why presume / stop bitching but the struggle as its own apart but the struggles together. the trampled tents laughing i hate i despise / the empty church & do not respect

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your festivals / what if we had two hundred thousand years more of this & if you are not angry from before these times / what riots will you have had enough / stop will you stop? pussy like most slang terms (see also: cunt) an endearing name for a girl / do not endear when riots are / which anger is this


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THE GINGERBREAD TREE ‘This is a free riot’

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JAY GRIFFITHS Hooligan Truth

You should, for your own good, have written a shapeless protest in grey ink, and shuffled it from hand to hand, under the scaffolding of a tenement not fit for purpose. Its echoes would have died with the hollow laughter of a dozen people, voiceless and invisible. Instead you beggared belief with a hooligan truth, told in gold. And it rang out all over the world, like cathedral bells.


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© Mark Burnhope

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HEL GURNEY Old Rhymes: A Hypothetical Interview Pussycat pussycat where have you been? – Further than London, but not as far as you think. – Calling on another female force; desiccated, ossifying. – But you’re asking the wrong questions. Mary Mary (mother, virgin, whore-Magdalene) quite contrary how does your garden grow? – Wild and undecorated. Lush. – With steel bars and scalloped edges. – The girls line up whatever I do. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl… – That’s already enough counting. – Mister Magpie must be laughing. He likes to collect. – The joke’s on him; no nest is forever.


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KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE Pomegranates for Lady Macbeth I wish that children came easy as a lie. That blood came, dropped like so many seeds thoughtlessly. It’s as if someone has sewn me up. So I took the handle of a knife and split a slit. Finally blood, for all the months I missed. Imagined a pomegranate spilling red-bruised-black. Imagined a girl her flesh was blue and sad imagined a boy his hair was black like mine imagined myself stretched scream-open and alive. It took five hours to stitch me up.

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They left my hands red so as not to forget.


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STEVEN HEIGHTON Vox Populi (A Poem for Voices) After the US and UK ‘idol’ competitions of 2008 We don’t give it to the frump We don’t give it to the fag We the voters speak in volume, we the people decide—— We don’t get to elect too much this decade in these kangaroo democracies but we’ll pick our brand of bread our size of circus – Idle republics balloting online We don’t give it to the queen in kohl with the cords to make love, live, to Freddie Mercury in the glam rock afterlife Hall of Fame, we give it to the boy next door with the four-four time and

solid tenor. We don’t give it to the spinster whose double chin overlaps the larynx of an angel, we give it to the lynxes the plausible blondes the plausible bodies we the voters speak in volume we the people decide—— Idiot kingdoms balloting online Idiot dominions balloting online America Britain Canada balloting, buying, buying in and billeting deep in your thoughtwashed hearts just the obvious, the facile, the ganz gemütlich – Canada you made me, now Canada you make me consider this: the mediocre man’s

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hatred of the marvelous (my own hatred, my own envy) – so listen up, you two, you runners-up, near-misses, pewter-not-gold-medaled by majority decree, by the louder- shouting swarm: lay it down and own it the way you can: you there, swagger, vamp and glam till we hear them gnashing their fillings on Fox, and picture a million indignant temple-veins throbbing – helplessly in time – We don’t give it to the hag We don’t give it to the fag Too bad, too late, they’re going to take it.


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© Mark Burnhope

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SOPHIE HERXHEIMER AND ALISON WINCH Trollops’ Cathedral Trolleying coffee and profiteroles pontificating from our indignant holes. Dolls, we stroll up and down these pointless aisles, all smiles. Penned in by the penis mightier than the sword? Do you need a bag for that? No, we’ll put it in our vaginas.

© Sophie Herxheimer


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SARAH HESKETH Some Protest Stones 1 Tell everyone. From today we sing only the hard words. Metal tongues snug in our mouths. White fire soloists. 2 We speak because we want to be spoken to. Do you have something to say? 3 Our whispers can scar the air. 4 We favour the louder nouns: Neon [ ] [ ]

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Blitzkrieg 5 Remember the rough coated wolf? The right breath can bring down houses. 6 Look at our voices. See how we’ve learnt to costume them like sluts. 7 Don’t try and refine us. We enjoy the tough accents of our cunts. 8 You’re right, of course, we’re always gagging for it. Our beautiful throats thrust upward in song.


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JEFF HILSON ‘With my Pussy Riot shorts on let me’ With my Pussy Riot shorts on let me say they really fit like Pussy Riot shorts with Russian women on are awesome/taking them off or keeping them on/on Monday I never even heard of Pussy Riot now it’s the long 21st Century/at the third stroke it will be 1965/bong/the Russian Madrigal School is thriving/bong/kinetic Abdullaev kicks timeless Berezovsky while repeating Davidov laughs & laughs don’t forget the anonymous Russian the complicated anonymous Russian/bong/my Pussy Riot shorts are minging/I’m sick of writing about Russians only the English Madrigal School exists/ with my Nadezhda Tolokkonikova balaclava & my Maria Alyokhina hand grenade I go on my nerves like that’s me going to the Gulag to listen to more Solzhenitsyn/ really who do you think you are Yekatarina Samutsevich who do you think you are

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ADAM HOROVITZ The Blackbird This morning, a blackbird swooped into the heart of my garden as I stood at the window bleary as an April cloud, a dressing gown hanging from the dry stone wall of my waking like a cowl of ivy. It cocked its head as if listening for the dreams of cats stalking the sofa’s edge, one button eye alert to my silence, then shifted its feet like a cheerful drunk come home too late and sang you into being. All day I’ve seen its song of you dancing in hedgerows, at the pavement’s edge, clutching Herb Robert like a wine glass reaching for the sun. A shivering flute-memory in the green of spring.


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RAY HSU The Numbers 1. The Books In Canada last year, men published 513 books, women published 523 books = women publish 5% more #cwila #pussyriot 2. The Reviews The Walrus: 23% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot Canadian Notes and Queries: 25% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot The Fiddlehead: 29% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot The National Post: 33% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot GEIST: 38% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot The Globe and Mail: 40% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot The BRICK literary journal: 40% of books reviewed written by women #cwila #pussyriot

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3. The Reviewers The National Post: 16% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot The Walrus: 17% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot The Literary Review of Canada: 24% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot BRICK: 28% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot Canadian Notes and Queries: 29% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot The Fiddlehead: 32% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot The Globe and Mail: 36% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot GEIST: 40% of book reviews written by adult women #cwila #pussyriot


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PETER HUGHES Poem pace the sanded boards of freshly emptied rooms down there the square where we accidently danced the verdiales with a wasp

mute

just pedal or the monkey dies

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PHILO IKONYA & HELMUTH A. NIEDERLE Pussy Riot Forever: The Body I riot, you riot, we riot. The body riots: Arterial riot Breast riot Cheek riot Dick riot Eye riot Finger riot Gall bladder riot Intestine riot Jaw riot Knee riot Liver riot Mouth riot Nose riot Prick riot Palate riot riot in Queues Renal riot Stomach riot Testes riot Thigh riot Tongue riot Umbilical riot Vagina riot Vocal cords riot


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Waist riot Wrist riot X-ray riot Yin yang riot Zeeee riot Dictators Never: Roll Call Aferworki Isaias riot Ben Ali riot Bashar al Assad riot Castro riot Duvalier Jean-Claude (Baby Doc!) riot Ershad Mohammed Hossain riot Francisco Franco riot Gaddafi Muamar riot Ghasmi Ahmad Al riot Hugo Chavez riot Hitler Adolf riot Hussein Saddam riot Idi Amin riot Jean Bedel Bokassa riot Karimov Islam riot Kim Jong Il riot Lukashenko Alexander riot Mugabe Robert riot Moi Daniel Toroitich Arap riot Noriega Manuel riot Ortega Daniel riot Pinochet riot Pol Pot riot PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN PUSSY RIOT!

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KIRSTEN IRVING Commentators Chewing Meat

The excitement here is one fat comet – do the crowd want to praise him or eat him alive? I’m joking of course; we all adore him like the sort of uncle who cuffs you for low grades but still brings you sweets – say, would you carve me another sliver? This chorizo is heaven’s lace – and at last here he comes, in his golden mortar, punting along with a sapphired pestle – is that mink or ermine lying dead on his shoulders? Are those real dragon’s teeth around his neck? –and the roars are so loud now you’d think – you’d think he’d steered his gondola into Moscow Zoo at feeding time – speaking of which, one more tongue’s worth couldn’t hurt – and has he gotten more muscular? His upper body seems bolstered with clay beneath that cloak; he’s practically a hunchback. But let’s not forget what we’re here for: this isn’t Milan, Paris, London. History! A two-thirds majority and a few royal nods have cleared the weeds from a long-dead job role – now guys, while I’m forking up another doily of pig, I want you to think on this: can men become gods these days? Did the window close with the last Roman emperor? Who gets to decide, if not other gods, who drift uselessly by like silent ships, fading into the fog? And if a god can die, what use is he anyway? Oh look! A scuffle! I do love scuffles!

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GENOWEFA JAKUBOWSKA-FIJAŁKOWSKA We Jew Women Translated from Polish by Marek Kazmierski Judyta Sara Batszewa with bruised eyes strangulation marks

cross the neck thighs branded with boot prints Polish Ewa a Jew down in Warsaw’s canals you: to your husband faithful your lover Jew woman reading writing poetry drinking beer then: looking for her son on street corners in each and every

supermarket car park me: Anne Frank my ribs collapsed no breasts only nipples and

hunger and these diaries and our Jewish fears


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MARIA JASTRZĘBSKA Annunciation She doesn’t know yet. Alone on the mountain she shivers, certain I bring catastrophe. Silence stretches for kilometres broken only by a bird’s cry, metal sharp. Her tender brown face lifted up beneath the white sky. What she sees is a cascade of ice, columns of stars hurtling down so fast they seem to her glacial, still. She is about to discover how much is possible. The ice is a means, nothing more or less, to contain the fire.


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TOM JENKS Fifty Shades of Putin When the Russians invade, I’m going to dress up in my sexiest clothes, put on my best makeup and carry a sign that says ‘Take me to your leader.’ In its September ‘Sexy Rating’ list, Russia’s Sex & the City magazine ranked now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the second sexiest politician. Ex KGB. Ex President. Damn sexy. Shooting guns and riding horses shirtless. I am only 30 minutes from the UN in NYC. Come see me sexy Mr Putin! ‘I know we don’t know each other that well yet,’ he said in that sexy Russian accent and took Leo’s hand, ‘but I feel this amazing connection between us. I admire Putin (i also think he’s sexy) as he places the interests of his country and its well-being as the top priority on his agenda. Sexy Vladimir Putin. Yes, I know what you are thinking. He’s pretty buff for a president. Oh Vladimir, you sexy dog you. There is something very charismatic and sexy about Putin – the mixture of power and his persona that just makes me wanna.... Sexy Putin. Putin gets a sexy calendar for his birthday. Yes, ok, Obama is sexy in a calm, cool and collected sort of way; but Vladíc ̌ek’s got that classic bad boy thing going on, and he’s just as clever. A sexy, sexy douchebag. Watch Putin’s racy and sexy campaign ad! Sexiest guy alive!! I can’t handle his sexiness! Putin can fuck Obama in everything. Putin is so motherfucking hot. He shud have been only in bikini-briefs..these r too many clothes on him. I think Putin inspires sex! I love Vladimir Putin. He is so sexy. He is my idol. omg, he is really sexy! and many other brazilians would agree with me. I admire this man so bad!! I wish my country had such a president (or PM). Besides, he’s very sexy. Too bad he’s 40 years older than me!! he’s just sooooo hoooot!!!!,he’s a total STUD!!, A TOTAL HUNK!!, he looks exactly like YUL BRYNNER (rip) the russian-american actor born in

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Vladivostok, oh my gosh, and he speaks german fluently he spent 5 years in Dresden for some job he held from the old Soviet Union, and his wife speaks spanish, she went to college to be a stewardess for the spanish language.... gosh she’s so lucky! I wish he could see me with those beautiful blue eyes and his beautiful sensual lips.!!! He is so handsome, talented and doesn’t take crap from anyone! Oh my...I went and bought the Times magazine that featured him. Wow. Just hot. One of the sexiest men of the 20th century!!! Shirtless putin is a shirtless win! Putin gives me such a boner! I’d have to vote Putin. His biceps are awesome. Vladimir Putin is the hooootttesstt!! president!! in this planet, he is so sexy, he’s looks are so sensual and his lips are so freaking sexual ups sensuall!! he’s hottttt :X he’s so sexy and dangerous.that cold look on his face makes me hot :X He has to be the hottest world leader. Those eyes are icy and dangerous. And he can ride a horse! That does it, Iam in love. He’s like a dolphin...a sexy dolphin. Well... that’s it... I am now gay for Vladimir Putin. Damn you YouTube! DAMN YOU! I would like to have sex with him! I love this Russian guy. This man should be a weapon of mass destruction under the sheets. I’d be heterosexual for Putin. oh my yummy sugar daddy vlad..with you by my side, there will be no room in my heart to be alone and sorrow. Putin appeals to both male & female, just like Freddie Mercury. I’m not gay or anything but I thing he is just fucking manly and sexy. I’m sorry, no human being cant resist putin charm. very hot man, I’d do him anytime..... love his triceps I like his physique! He has well built body! He could be a good bodybuilder too!!! Likes his body. He has beautiful body. I would like to see him in bikinies. omg! he’s hot!!!!! It is a cosmetic surgery for the beauty. I will draw his picture in nude. This dude must’ve been pumped in his prime. The fittest president. Sexy man :)


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ANTONY JOHN ‘grey skies with it’

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PHILL JUPITUS Girl Banned As a child I sang in church My unbroken alto Seeking that frequency Which resonated the most Imagining impassive stone Humming along Recently I watched Four girls sing in a church But they did resonate All saints not sinners Too hep to burn Un-sugared babes Destiny’s children They had the world bewitched Girls cool Girls empowered Girls with real spice Telling us what they want What they really, really want But cold hard Vladimir Remained unmoved Called their rock folly So they weren’t Girls allowed


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AMY KEY Cat Power Everybody come together Free Everybody get together Free It’s not okay if you can stand to let her dance It’s okay it’s your right, come on and take a chance True Romance, when you dance Free Don’t be in love with the autograph. Just be in love when you scream that song on and on Free Everybody come together Free Everybody get together Free You can feel her from the palm that you’re holding on your arm Cool hands from the get-go Can your feast on the real one Don’t be in love with the autograph Just be in love when you love that song on and on Free It’s okay if you can stand to let him dance It’s okay; it’s your right come on and take a chance. True Romance, when you dance Free Everybody come together Free Don’t fall in love with the autograph Just fall in love when you sing your song on the? Take a chance True Romance, when you dance Free Free Free Free Free Free

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JOHN KINSELLA Penillion for Pussy Riot Faux fathers take Pride away, rake In the money Quick fast and pray Dead souls to make The count, forsake Their liberty. ‘Security’ Is the serfdom Of the kingdom On earth: weapons- Grade big truncheon Penetration To boost nation Of God Father To spite Mother. Shake, rattle, roll. Kiss sacred scroll As if worship Is the fillip To topple self- Styled god Himself, Master icon And his henchmen.


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MELISSA LEE-HOUGHTON No Denial Clueless girls walk crooked in heels, not soft on their soles; heads banging, warm inside, like the West with its department

stores ringing with perfume counters. Rip up all the walls with your ripe fists. You storm but the sad girls wear French knickers. They ask you to sing with them. They ask you to fly with them, to button up with them, and you suture these new scars with kisses that your kids send peeling over the airwaves. If not lime and hot pink in balaclavas, you have to listen and listen and the listening is schizophrenic; you saw them throw away the book, you saw people smiling like they were witnessing progress, and you did not puke. Other girls, they dance around the frying pan. Obedience isn’t something you learn or acquire, it is something that happens to you when you play with the wrong bad song. You can’t unlearn it in bras that make you three times bigger. Who did they see when you sat in collusions, and they asked all the right questions – they saw hair and eyes, and a soul flying out through a mouth and shadows they couldn’t scrub off the varnished wood.


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DEBORAH LEVY ‘Pussy Riot – let’s just tell it how it is’

Pussy Riot – let’s just tell it how it is. You are female artists who sang a song that frightened angry men with their backs to the wall. We all know they stamped on you because they are living in the last days of old power. We all know that bullying young women is not the way to run the world. The cat is out of the bag! FREE PUSSY RIOT TODAY!

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IRA LIGHTMAN Venus’ Hair Venus’ do was a luscious blonde delta swept up and over the higher hemisphere, the back of her head. In slingshot, I see the rivers of hair. They’re a stranger’s. Who has to lack the pearl smile, the sun-disc face, glow that flamed from Venus’ eyes. Soutien-Gorge

other early versions of the brassiere resembled a camisole stiffened with boning – Wikipedia

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FRANCESCA LISETTE PUSSY RIOT 4EVA I love decay. Operating from parturient maple & paranoid sexual this is not what I pretended, this is not the organ of devolved logic. the parasite angel at the end of the world fear of a lost frame spoked: rubber flesh cut cute ‘already gay’ climate sun stirred irreproachably meantime inanimate magnates Tinged you in enigmatic weather what, so you shroud liminal bone rhythms in didactic (un)consciousness Farmed away gift mint on hotel pillow By the lightest knock against elbow hot tardy decrepit peace out in waste solitude a dare w/ neck cracked leaking fumes, a cauldron of hit-and-miss CHILDCATCHER To live authentically is to die into yourself each minute else impossible pan to a loopy left blue horoscope sea-scape impulse stranded determined to die or not strive The hole in dark foil trembles w/ heat of your body when you really make love, allude to anti-toxic electricity which has never yet poured from the earth yet ripped from god’s veins the arctic scramble nausea bone define


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a tall black dove chipped away at. ‘What,’ might you ask, ‘is the political sentiment behind the moment of sexuality?’ & I’d say ‘the meaning of coming is to arrive & arrive & arrive & never stop arriving’

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M. LÝ-ELIOT Punk Protection Let open punk pussies protect us from the dissembling putain, Innocent pussy raids recover the lost holy symbols, That were cached away by tricksy Grey Rasputain. The inner freedom of the open pussies amplifies – In desperate circumstances, we are not indifferent – But tactfully we offer you bright Punk(s) Protection.


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ALEX MACDONALD Please Welcome to the Stage Okay guys I hope you’re ready to show support They have come from a place Where the tall churches dapple sunlight And are not owned by the shades of gold leaf halos, But by shadier folk, where the narrow way Leads to light, and any other way is like A cartoon corridor, the same portraits And windows repeating, you wonder Whether they’ll ever escape, Where brown bears eat cats in dark alleyways And audience you look beautiful tonight Your hands clapping in the black and white Of the strobe light looks like prayer so go crazy, Here they are, ladies, please put your hands together, And keep them where we can see them.

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MELISSA MACK ‘The Dream. I woke up’ * The Dream. I woke up because I opened the door and you were there in a balaclava: seized awake by shock or a goddess, and today we read of the οὖλον ὄνειρον, baleful dream, Anne said she preferred that translation, and Zeus thundered, Dream! and said, GO, and Dream hearkened ἂρα, at once, and Brandon said usually this ἂρα signals ‘surprise attendant upon disillusionment’ and I thought of my dream and all the signs coming and going all around and my θυμος went down into the river to cry quietly for a while, but then he said, in this instance, our ἂρ’ signals ‘lively interest in what will happen next’ and I was rushed up. It goes like that a lot. Everything is baleful. Everything is amazing. Pussy Riot in prison. FRIENDS and LOVE and LOVING and FUCKING.


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CHRISTODOULOS MAKRIS Sleepwalker on Stage Half-way through the play a sleepwalker walks on stage and sprinkles apprehension on the audience. Though the script is acted out in a foreign tongue he intuits it at once and disrupts the accepted balance. Some stop their hissing to tune in to what is happening. Most of the actors push him around while the rest study his body language. The sleepwalker slouches towards the fringe of the stage becoming central to the day’s drama.

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AOIFE MANNIX The Eye of the Needle I bet when Jesus went into the temple and started knocking over stalls, there were those who said this is just some punk from Bethlehem pulling a PR stunt, and it’s disrespectful and it’s disgusting and he needs to get what he deserves so we’ll pin him to a cross and won’t consider that two thousand years later his words will rise up in a prayer that says Putin with your 22m roubles worth of white gold watches, and your flotilla of yachts, and your 20 palaces and your flying toilet that cost 75,000 dollars, you with your Mercedes, helicopters, villas, aeroplanes, swimming pools, you are just an echo of that other Pilate dictator who also thought he could cling to power by torturing those that seemed weak but knew the strength of turning the other cheek.


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BARBARA MARSH Hustera Open your legs – here is the gateway to hysteria, a wandering of the womb, le ventre de la mère, surely more like a breezeway to another room, a blow-through on the way to the sea, the lunar push and pull, its waxing light, crescent moods of our watery brains. Squat here, my little kumquat, home of the giddy vibrations, birthplace of everything.

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AGNES MARTON Extinct Not for the keepsake, not for the grab Not for the squeamish go-it-let (Are you a sweetdream-architect or just an item I collect?) Spare to share: not a hamsty-dial Life is tough like a pantyliner (Pain-balloon to a plenty-liar, am I a species in denial?) Prayer leads sometimes to trial surfacing the inmost layer Are we stuck, fellow-ladybirds? Who can repair the pussy-player?


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SOPHIE MAYER All about Suffrage was Taught under Mrs. Catt’s

Direction Or, Djuna Barnes reports from the trial of Pussy Riot. I’ve come from the side of the world. I’ve been on the underside of the watch. I’ve been breast-to-breast with the ticks.

Even the air in Russia causes pain to us! This is what happens when you touch an abscess ready to burst! You struck against the very snakes’ nest which has now attacked you!

Glimpses in the Condensed Course of Two Weeks, where all about suffrage was taught under Mrs. Catt’s direction.

When I am powerless, I am strong. We are against Putin’s chaos. Orthodox culture might also be on the side of civil revolt.

Girls who grew old in a year.

Only when they weighed up the political and symbolic damage that we had inflicted with our art did they decide to protect society against us and our conviction. Prison is Russian in miniature. We are freer than all those who sit opposite us on the side of the prosecutor, because we can say what we please, and we do.

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The stage was a thing of the future, and future possibilities at work on it: a vivid gehenna!

That is how this complicated punk adventure ended. Where should the blame lie for the performance in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral and the subsequent trial? It lies with the authoritative nature of the political system. I am extremely angered by the phrase ‘so-called’ which the State Prosecutor uses to refer to contemporary art. This trial is just a so-called trial!

They were not naughty songs, mademoiselle; they were life – They were the little pen knife blade with which one cuts the wrist of malice and deceit.

Religion was in opposition then. They spat on our outstretched hand – They shouldn’t have. I am not afraid of you.

Oh, dear Lord, what have we done to receive so much beauty per flash! Note: All offset quotations are from the trial statements made by Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova during their trial, as translated by Sasha Dugdale. All other material is quoted from Djuna Barnes’ journalism, as collected in ed. Douglas Messerli, Poe’s Mother.


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Vagina

She’d always thought it was an alien word, and now it was. What they said, again again, lip-synching to the rhythm of our oldest fear on every screen. Three classical syllables, the feminine rhyme apparently asking, ‘Take me to your queen.’ But no salve. No. This was no Churchillian V-sign flicked up to mark a new world, heaven here on earth. There was nothing new when it began: as old as caves. Or universe. Vastness is one translation, the envelope sheathing and unsheathing cosmic volume. Revealing our vulnerability as theirs. Kristeva, chapter and verse: the speech of the depressed is an alien skin. Shed. She’d shrug it pinkly off, its inner velvet. She’s always been. And been here, a Venusian Pirate Jenny slowly amassing the voltage to bring them, across the volutes and inversions of interstellar space, converging in.

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SALLY MCALISTER The Queendom of Revolution I have been thinking about our decision, I have been inspired by so much confusion, that sometimes it began to hurt, to a high level of despair I can no longer convert. For freedom for feminism For Revolution An Art sacrificed through the ashes of nihilism has put my soul on hold and eaten my conscience to the bone. Surreptitiously sneaking into your cell is the dream I keep having every night and we would talk about this fight about all these inspired things you could not tell. Please, please, talk to me again about it, Whisper the blue notes of this punk revolution, Or they will turn black in slow motion, And there will be no forces that you can’t beat. Behind bars you remain locked and I Miss Colorful masks of the almighty anonymous feminists raising their guitars up high, and all these fists waving forcefully in the air for a slice of justice. ‘So-called’ freedom is to be put down In favor of a truthful desired human freedom legitimate female liberation we can call our own, The queens are taking back power over the Kingdom.


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Love, Love, Love, Is what I strongly feel about your free spirits, Slightly embracing the intimacy of this cove, Letting the fears and hates falling down the pit. Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot The women who managed to bring our fight back, To give riot grrrls a second life other than white & black, To instill the courage to never again be quiet. No silence No shame No fear No repression No injustice No more, no more deaf illusions. For our three brave Riots, For our three outstanding women, For the freedom of speech That beats in every heart of bleach, For a taste of a new wave of feminism which will go beyond all political criticism I salute the future of our new beginnings, I salute the desire of our strong feelings, Because united we stand with Pussy Riot, Defending the Art of protest and creation, For Masha, my electrifying delight, For Nadezdha, the unstoppable force, For Yekaterina, the awe-inspiring soul, For all of our raging punk prayer growls, For our beloved daughters of Revolution.

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MICHELLE MCGRANE The Suitable Girl The suitable girl is not temperamental, does not throw tantrums, have rages in public places, or swear. She does not take drugs or stay out late, she is the daughter of family friends. She does not phone you drunk in the middle of the night or ignore your calls, she does not make you happy.


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MICHAEL MCKIMM The Wall after Yun Suh’s film City of Borders (2009) And then there was the boy they called Haifa, First Queen of Palestine, out with his gang, always the first up on the wall as they leapt in stealth to Jerusalem. Warm night. Dancing. Closeness of skin. An alleyway of lights outside the club where boys spill, touting their war wounds: text-message death threats, knife cuts, glass-eyes. All here for Haifa, his once a week over that wall for the one place of light in Jerusalem; no one looking at his arms in the arms of a man, his dazzling dress and beautiful eyes, thoroughly alive. And then there’s the bullet which came in the post now swung into a song: a sweet chorus of pop in the Jerusalem night.

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DREW MILNE Microphonics main features bias switch gain tone control drive and master of the fowl and brute timidity power break speak attenuator but when said box come open out jumps junior head badge surprise surprise same factory same printed circuit board the pile of faults adding this nice extra amid the transformation now extremely articulate and detailed with a fair amount of clean headroom punchy sings quick to lively response curve you get classic crunch marvels such warm harmonics then not not the stuff the transistor ever heard but full and rich natural break up blowing off creamy distortion in negative feedback while the sustain just flows on on footsteps planted in the sea


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HELEN MOORE Cunt Magic This gap in the hedge is neither absence nor lack but a green Moon – the frame around the young Wheat beyond, a heavenly gateway that beckons us to quit the path, its stiles and bridleways, the blue willow-patterns of our thought, and pass through this cunicle, this cunning – finger its tender flowers, its pitted stems, feel frissons of what we once knew as holy. Thereafter trust that the bird not in the hand is worth a cunctipotence in the bush, and reawaken the desire for Life’s wild fecundity.

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A.F. MORITZ Lao Tzu’s Spear Be female and a destroyer of empire, sang Lao Tzu in his wisdom book: it seems the old master used to love to lie in dreams in the blossoming forest, under the breasts of the hills, under the hair of the trees. He dreamed of the spear of his mind raised as though he were still a young hero, a wandering outcast on the run, pursued through the alleys of his country: a young man with the hair of a black sun, hunted by many haters, as he went seeking justice for his people. He dreamed the spear of his mind raised up, even in old age, by the sight, touch, and scent of the rosy crack in a warm moss-shadowed stone that lay beside him in the woods as he wrote and loved, wrote and loved freedom, and drank the perfect peace that is also the pounding, criminal, street-urchin beat of the world.


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BARBARA NORDEN from Babylon ELEANOR GOES TO THE ROW OF VESTMENTS, CHOOSES A SURPLICE AND PUTS IT ON OVER HER BLACK DRESS. ELEANOR: Now for the gaudiest chasuble. MARIE AND ELEANOR THROW VESTMENTS ONTO THE FLOOR. ELEANOR PUTS ON THE BRIGHTEST CHASUBLE MARIE: Prepare the mixture. THEY POUR WATER INTO THE POT AND STIR. ELEANOR: I hate and despise your images, feast days, processions, solemn assemblies, saith the Lord. THEY FORM A PROCESSION. ELEANOR: Do you reject spires? MARIE: Let us have ladies. ELEANOR: Do you reject all churches? MARIE: Let us worship at Susan’s kitchen table. ELEANOR: Do you excommunicate Sundays that have become so corrupted? MARIE: Let us have a new Sabbath.

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ELEANOR: Let it be Monday. SUSAN: Sounds like Sunday. ELEANOR: Let it be called Moonday. ELEANOR GOES TO THE CARVED CHAIR. ELEANOR: Help me to raise it. THEY LIFT THE CARVED CHAIR ONTO THE TABLE. ELEANOR: I shall need a footstool. THEY DRAW UP A CHAIR. ELEANOR STEPS UP AND SITS ON THE THRONE. ELEANOR: Give me the holy pot. MARIE GIVES HER THE POT OF WHEAT PASTE AND THE SPOON. ELEANOR: By this confection of tar and wheatpaste. Give me the mitre. MARIE PLACES THE MITRE ON ELEANOR’S HEAD. MARIE: Your grace. ELEANOR DIPS THE SPOON IN THE POT AND RAISES IT. MARIE: Duh duh. ELEANOR SPRINKLES THE MIXTURE AROUND.


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ELEANOR: I declare myself Archbishop and Metropolitan. THE DEAN ENTERS. THE DEAN SEES SUSAN THEN ELEANOR THERE IS PANIC AND TERROR ON HIS FACE. SUSAN: [to MARIE] Run. You’ll be burnt for sure. MARIE: What about her? SUSAN: Her daughter’s the Countess of Jezebel. ELEANOR: I do hereby excommunicate the Sabbath since it is corrupted. From now on we will celebrate Monday. And it shall be called Moonday. MARIE GOES, STRUGGLING OUT OF THE CHASUBLE. THE DEAN APPROACHES THE THRONE DEAN: [to ELEANOR] Give me that spoon. It is not an aspergillum. ELEANOR SHAKES THE SPOON OVER HIM AS IF SPRINKLING HOLY WATER. DEAN: [to SUSAN] Fetch ten men. SUSAN GOES.

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Note: The scene is a re-imagining of a real event. In 1636, in the run up to the English Civil War, three women staged a demonstration in Lichfield Cathedral. By order of the Archbishop of Canterbury the cathedral had recently been refurbished with elaborate displays which the three women saw as symbols of the oppressive power of the king. Eleanor saw herself as a prophet warning the king to change his ways before the imminent end of the world.


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REDELL OLSEN Stuff Your Piney Whispers put some thrash on and stuff your piney whispers

of days spent pasturing ready-made containers boxed lap-tips control snacks chemise finalists on hands free daytime stuff my rented cup floods o’er basement patent winners hum floral etch-a-sketch rims of murky family wax ornamental dry instant crystal self goo

put some thrash on and stuff your piney whispers

two-handled so goods at being in the queue newly made of tinned fresh out still chemical works keeps on at use less spoils counter sell beans policy grow suck swollen after fall pouts back to task imagines train for desk bound bleach marvels strike quip roots from Hades

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touch feeling marks as stone a groove known of metals cash or piss factory ahhs for sonic reducers of nightingale wafting lean on blast hearty mind of karaoke anxious for cultivates dead good in plastic plants tonight I aim bucolic is overheard not born a billy-goat


fed future bleeps up demographic shapes hides of mutual calf yoked pod celebrants kiss competitors goth products in hair spill libations aisle slick lips rung from shot age shred pack info skins echo plasma kids eaten alive tax estate granted bleats


songs at locked doors out disobey certainties let collagen improve piping let the mouse


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taste the pitch let out for the split-oops voice or belly-crawl let’s off give snort to the peck let’s move to pieces let’s lay in sheaves of office stationery ground

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SANDEEP PARMAR Propaganda after Boris Taslitzky’s ‘Riposte’ See, how in the foreground The mass locked to the dock at Port-de-Bouc sound their riposte. Risen from the flesh to the mouth of a wolfhound: to hell with the State the workers yell throwing bricks as if they were bread, hot with the elocution of the dead. A woman falls backwards as the hound goes for her face. Taslitzky knows that only dogs could follow such orders with their own authority. He paints them aghast. Understanding the iconography of revolt, he foresaw how the frigate bullioned by war would otherwise slink quietly into the grey sea’s edge slow and elsewhere— like memory. Like the daily news of riot that blurs redoubtable across the conscience but does not stir. This is why Taslitzky, surviving Buchenwald, paints a man (himself?) into the foreground fist raised (like a tricoloured standard driven into the mouth of a beast) watching the fear of the expected blow petrify the policeman (the policeman is Hitler— his mother died at Auschwitz) whose body twists. The artist can only draw a scene so clear as this That when mutiny enters the heart it does not leave.


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Note: Taslitzky’s ‘Riposte’ (1951) responded to a violently suppressed 1949 strike by port workers in Marseille who refused to supply ships bound for colonial conflicts in Indo-China as an act of protest. The controversial and anti-imperialist painting was removed by government authorities from the Salon d’Automne during a visit by France’s President, Vincent Auriol.

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ANNA PERCY Inspired by Matisse’s ‘Blue Nude IV’ Tell me about the blue women of your acquaintance tell me you see the waves of electric blue, emanating from grey clothes, contorted, sectioned off head severed at the neck, held on by empty hands, Limbs folded protecting the body the acute blue body the body radiating blueness and the cause of blueness In its largeness, its smallness, its marks, the drugs, the want, the need, the surplus, old fingerprints, its victories, its refusals. only blue women really sing the blues their treble clefs and quavers blue between the lines on sheet music, on their breath, out of speakers, in steam in showers, all unnoticed in tears and cheap scorching whiskey, trembling, cerulean fading to stonewash in the troposphere I am a blue woman too after the smell of spent explosives dissipates on the 6th November Till the wilting of daffodils on 6th April I too am gas flame, pained, burning up those who touch blue women are too sharp: walking blades they cut swathes unnoticed


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JODY PORTER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot Found poem, 20 September 2012 The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

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FRANCES PRESLEY Mrs Pankhurst in Parliament

the beginning of lines thinning hair short waves

full length dress trimmed

fur at neck and cuffs

What pretty clothes she wore they seemed

artless

> Why should women go to Parliament Square be battered about

produce less effect than when they throw stones >

She speaks with a simplicity which arrests

attention

> If men will not do us justice they shall do us violence >

weighted her words

> Men I know what shame is in your hearts >

She lifted them up by holding out her arms

willow twig

in her declining palm

> Don’t look at me like that!

Bless you, your old mother likes it This is what I call life! >


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KAREN PRESS Strange Strangers ate my cunt, asking a thousand questions as to its use, the material of which it was made. I screamed. How eagerly, how intently their heads bent down, eyes fixed upon the strange lips. I had in my possession a word. A hideous image: one man, lewd hands, his face covered with feathers, his serpentine form. My word. A rough demand. I told them it was a weapon, a fierce death. Passed from one to the other. God—God— and again. Note: An erasure poem based on Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush.


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KATY PRICE Accessories And now she takes a razor to her face gives it a reason, justifies the space slicing through words and pictures on the back creates a stronger image in its place here is no punishment, is only grace. Liberated, snapping shut the case concluding with an eyeliner attack applying just the right amount of sparkle measuring herself against their muddle clarity cries out from every line it is way of focusing the trouble; inviolate, protected from the struggle laughing in the face of every puzzle now she knows, she knows how to be fine.

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ANA PULTENEY Pussy Riot Rap, August 2012

CHORUS (To start, and repeat between verses)

THREE WIMIN ARE NOW MASKED BEHIND BARS,

YET DESE SISTAS ARE UNIVERSALLY OURS, THREE WOMEN ARE NOW MASKED BEHIND BARS,

MEK SURE DEY GET NO MORE SCARS.

1 Set up de lightin fires ov Revolution, Cos dere gonna be a lotta disillusion,

Mongst de people who ave no satisfaction, Wiv politicians who ave set up PUTrefaction.

2

Five months dese sistas spent in detention, Dere grey faces show shades ov ibernation,

So tis upta us ta repeat de intention Of supportin dere moves ov dissension.

3

Wimin are risin gainst regimes ov repression, Not by fightin, killing an outright aggression. Wi ave more constructive ways ov expression,

Through outreach, lurve an direct action.

4 So listen up, an mek sure ya is givin attention,

Ta dese sistas, an ALL wimin taken from civilisation, Because dis world will suffa desecration,

Wivout de voices ov wimin ho need LIBERATION!!!!!!


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CHELLA QUINT In Vogue I need to get an awesome balaclava quick. It’s London Fashion Week and they’re totally sick. I wish now I’d gone to Knit and Natter. They said my technique didn’t matter. But I want a balaclava that’s unique in the crowd. In a striking design. In a colour that’s loud. I want to be noticed. I want to stand out. I want the mouth hole to show off my Benefit pout. Cut holes my tights? That would ruin a pair, And the elastic compression would mess up my hair. Not a knotted T-shirt – that would be too ad hoc. This is a serious cause, guys. My look has to rock. How to Make a Stencil

1. First copy or trace the stencil onto thick card or thin plastic.

2. Then cut out the white sections with a scalpel-shaped craft knife on a cutting mat or over a surface you don’t care about like an old phone book. (Do they still make those? I only save mine for stencilling on and stapling into.)

3. Spray the cut bits with a light colour onto a dark wall. (You may need to spray the background first. This could be a two day operation.)

4. Remember to get spare nozzles and clean them out afterward, and you may need to wear gloves or cover your trigger finger.

5. You should probably not stick around admiring your work for too long.

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© Chella Quint.

Currently in the 20x20 exhibition at Access Space, Sheffield. Free to use for non-commercial purposes.


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RED OF THE VAGINELLAS Fine Line It’s all fine lace and legs in the air; a line of feathered girls on show, fishnetted hint of skin that’s bare. It’s all white lace and legs in the air, cancanning silk at Folies Bergère: a swirling, twirling, teasing row. It’s all holed lace and legs in the air – a line of tethered girls, on show.

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SELINA ROBERTSON ‘a pussy is a riot’ a pussy is a riot is a rose is a riot is a rose is a pussy is a riot.


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SOPHIE ROBINSON Free Pussy I’ve got the vagina your mother told you about & it’s coming for you so watch out – couplet vagina, hairy scruff, parkland butchery waiting for your tender hand descending. Happy vaginas on TV open and close like poetry. Sad vaginas on the streets stripped of their rights, tight-lipped & talkless in alleys always. Awake & waiting, outer hallways of a world full of those who know it could be better & isn’t. Sad disco where we can dance off our hurts free pussy / lock hips / solidarity / stay alert.

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SHELAGH M. ROWAN-LEGG You Are Here the essential map: draw a yellow circle around your waist work outward crayons for the blues and greens draw outside the lines dirt under your fingernails for land masses, river’s edge political borders always in red use a razor cut at the base of your neck draw scars across arms, torso make new ones before old ones heal clear your mind of the history when blood stops flowing begin again


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FATHIEH SAUDI Theatre They met at the entrance of a theatre. ‘Come and help us,’ they said, ‘let’s begin to open the eyes of children to human rights.’ Once upon a time, she dreamed of freedom, she was rebellious, she believed then in women’s rights, everyone’s rights. Encountering them again took her back to innocence. Could she raise her voice again? Could she shatter the silence? Could she claim one human right? Who would bring Akhmatova back to the stage? Who would bring Spartacus back to life?


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JOHN SIDDIQUE Thirst Imagine thirst without knowing water. And you ask me what freedom means. Imagine love without love. Some things are unthinkable, until one day the unthinkable is here. Imagine thirst without knowing water. Some things we assume just are as they are, no action is taken to make or sustain them. Imagine love without love. It is fear that eats the heart: fear and endless talk, and not risking a step. Imagine thirst without knowing water. Fold away your beautiful thoughts. Talk away curiosity, chatter away truth. Imagine love without love. Imagine believing in the whispers, the screams and the gossip. Dancing to a tune with no song to sing inside you. Imagine love without love.

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Unwritten Unwrite her name. Undo the letters of her name. Take away all reference of her from your bibles and your scrolls, take God’s wife from him and make him in your own image. Make him lonely; make him what you need him to be. Make her a dæmon, a screech owl, a succubus, an invader of your unspoken dreams.

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ADRIAN SLATCHER ‘Her Jazz’ for Pussy Riot Sonic temples blasting out sound’s whiplash across time and space; up close to the speaker stacks at Manchester Boardwalk in, when was it, ‘93? Listening to Huggy Bear play ‘Her Jazz,’ like a slow fuse burning across land and ocean, bouncing off the satellites – into a different consciousness, where the worst a girl can do is pick up a guitar, put on a hood and thrash our her version of her jazz – under the unguarded eye of Mother Russia, for music has the right to have children and there they are, Riot Grrl prodigy, rebels without a pause, waking up this morning in a jailhouse-rocksteady-all-my-colours- wop-bop-a-lu-bop-white-riot-kick-out-the-jams- verse-chorus-verse silence silence, but the noise outside is deafening.


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DANIEL SLUMAN ‘Her face when she came’ Her face when she came was a car-crash each muscle tensed like prayer eyes blurring desire as blood squirmed her arched hips the body a controlled demolition her soul clumsily trying to leave its wrapper

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ALI SMITH Song Every time you say no to something that’s wrong a crack the size of a hair & a single note of that song inserts itself in the stone the meaning of strong it might take a short time it might take long no no no listen, millions of us singing along.


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BARBARA SMITH Pair Bond for Dolly Parton & performed by the Poetry Divas The talk in the bar lulls a half-time fill: as I knife-scrape the head from another pint, he hovers, pocket-foothering his change. Steadying for the ask, he addresses my full frontals, my baby buggy bumpers, my Brad Pitts, my boulders, my billabongs, my squashy cushions, my soft-focus bristols, my motherly bosoms, my matronly bulk, my Mickey and Minnie, my Monica Lewinskys, my Isaac Newtons, my snow tyres, my speed bumps, my Tweedle twins, my milk makers, my Mobutus, my num-nums, my Pia Zadoras, my Pointer Sisters, my honkers, my hooters, my hubcaps, my hummers, my Eartha Kitts, my Eisenhowers, my God’s milk bottles, my Picasso cubes, my chesticles, my cha-chas, my coconuts, my dairy pillows, my devil’s dumplings, my objectified orbs, my über-boobs, my one-parts Lara, my two-parts globe, my skyward pips, my lift and separate, my airbags, my feeders, my mammy glands, my Bob and Ray, my big bouncing Buddhas,

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my sweater stretchers, my sweet potatoes, my rosaceous rotors, my trusty rivets, my melliferous melons, my mau-maus, my tarty, my taut, my pert palookas, my jahoobies, my kicking kawangas, my agravic gobstoppers, my immodest maids, my Scooby snacks, my squished-in shlobes, my cupcakes, my soda bread, my bloomin’ baps, my brilliant bangers, my brash bazookas, my windscreen wipers, my Winnebagos, my wopbopaloubop bopbapaloos, my yahoos, my yazoos and yipping yin-yangs, my paps, my pips, my pommes-de-terres, my pushed-up, plunged-down, paraded balcony, my slow reveal, my instant appeal, my décolletage, my fool’s mirage, and I watch him pay up, steady up and leave.


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TOM SPENCER Dear Pussy Riot I am so angry and bitter at my failure to finish this work. I’m always on Facebook and Twitter; I’m such a prick and a jerk. I’d much rather I was a pussy. Though prison is bad for the health, your anger is huge and unfussy; you care about more than yourself. So maybe you’ll find it consoling, though this poem is a lot of rot: you remind me, with art, the important thing is to keep at it, no matter what.

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JON STONE Подшлемниках (Balaclavas) after Osip Mandelstam, Сестры - тяжесть и нежность

heaviness, tenderness twin sisters – honeybees and suckle roses

a man croaks – hot sand turns cool – a sunken sun is carried forever on

a burnt black stretcher yesterday’s sun, I guess

weighty honeycombs

delicate seines – boulders are than names so the whole day I’ve been

married to this one purpose: to shrug the weight

of time – I don’t think much else matters anymore

I raise the petrol-soaked

air to my lips and drink it like water a rose was earthed – time tilled by blades – in the slow

tourbillon , tender roses turning, braiding heaviness, tenderness


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ANDREW TAYLOR No New Items We are free as birds only the birds aren’t free – John Cage The silver keeps things fresh morning fuel if nothing runs on the tracks rust will slowly appear Jenny and Tracey sleep in the convertible at the airport Amy is making the bed before getting in Sarah needs weatherproof footwear Behind low cloud the sun will still set Dreams of coloured tights Navy purple grey sort of magenta sort of electric blue bright green fern green bottle green a rainbow of reds but NOT yellow or orange – all wrong Dreams of coloured balaclavas and Kate wearing brogues Behind low cloud the sun will still rise

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Once the tracks are active the rust will disappear


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PHILIP TERRY from Inferno: Canto XXXIII Raising his mouth from that horrible snack, This blood-soaked shade wiped his lips clean on the Squashed thatch of that head he had chewed up behind Then spoke: ‘You’ve got a cheek, wee man, asking Me to rake over the coals of a grief so desperate That the very thought of it freezes my bones; But if my words are to be a seed, that may Bear the fruit of infamy for this traitor That I gnaw, then prick up your ears, For you shall hear me weep and gas at once. I’ve no idea who you are, nor what business Brings you traipsing around down here, but something In your voice tells me that you were once from Belfast. Know then, that I was Bobby Sands, and this Here is Maggie Bloody Thatcher – now let me Tell you why I am so unneighbourly. Maybe I’ve no need to tell youse that it was her Government that locked us up with common criminals, Denying us political status When there was a war on. But the cruelty of My imprisonment you can not imagine. When they took away our fucking clothes, we went On the blanket; when they emptied our chamber pots All over our fucking beds, only then did we

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Start our dirty protest. The stench was appalling, The cells were literally covered in shite, And everywhere you looked there were flies and maggots. It was like something out of Dante, you know, Only this was really happening, in 1979. Through the thick pane of frosted glass I had gazed on many passing moons, when I Woke to the banging of truncheons on perspex. Before you could say “Up the IRA!” We were ripped from our cells and dragged along The corridor by our legs, then we ran the gauntlet Of the ranked riot police who hit us with Truncheons as we passed; we were kicked and Pushed to the floor, where they held us down, Then sheared us like sheep, scrubbing us With floor mops, before they tossed us back inside Our cells. They had done their best to break us, And had failed, when at last they seemed to give in To our demands – but it was a lousy trick, The clothes they offered were not our own. We trashed the place screaming blue murder, Vowing revenge on the whole pack of them. The next day we sat in silence, and the Day after that as well. It was around the time they brought our food That the idea came to me, it had Worked in the past, so why not try it again?


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Hunger strike. But this one would be to the death, Each striker starting at intervals, and each time one Of us died, another man would step into his shoes. It’s no joke watching yourself die like that, The pain is indescribable As you start digesting your own innards – Anyone but the immovable Thatcher Would have compromised before ten men died, But all she said was “A crime is a crime is a crime.”’ When he had spoken these words he rolled his eyes Like a famine victim, then seized the miserable Skull with his teeth, which as a dog’s were Strong upon the bone. Oh Long Kesh, blot Upon the landscape of that fair country Where the sound of ‘aye’ is heard! So what if Bobby Sands bombed the Balmoral Furnishing Company, Did that give you the right to make him And nine others die before letting the Politicals wear their own shirts? The greatest betrayal in politics is retrenchment, And the British Government’s inflexibility, Matched only by the inflexibility of the hunger strikers Themselves, prolonged the conflict by 20 years.

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SARAH THOMASIN To Vladimir Putin (A Pussy Riot Poem) I will put on my bright balaclava And I will sing. And I will sing about your crimes And I will sing about your lies And I will sing about my rage From the pulpit from which You preach your hate. And I will invoke the gods Whom you have corrupted And I will turn them against you. And if you arrest me I will sing still. And if you imprison me The singing will continue For my brothers and my sisters For my friends and my comrades For my beloved strangers and my unknown allies Will put on their bright balaclavas And they will sing. And they will sing. And they will sing.


169

CLAIRE TRÉVIEN Abridged and Complete Biography of Olympe de

Gouges You were born on a tongue of land resting on a tit, from which sprung willows that made the slightest wind look like snow no wonder you left for the singeing gash of Paris where they called you a he-woman at the slice for daring to spunk for women’s rights. If a woman can be brought to the scaffold, you said, she should be allowed to fucking shout! Thank fuck you roar in the archives, slobbering over the filing system! You’re an army of sixty kings and no subject, you’re a butcher and his widow, you’re every Mary I’ve watched eat a tax collector for lunch and still have room for a groom. Your plays haven’t washed in two hundred years and grow brown at the armpits. So what if they stink and whistle at men in the street? At least they don’t give a shit about our precious feelings, you’re a willow soaked in blood and set on fire and when the wind gusts you shit on it.

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GEORGE TTOOULI Explicit Yesterday’s children playing on the park’s climbing frame. The climbing frame is monstrous and wants to kill them. It wants to kill the children for playing in the park. Men enter the park wearing each others’ faces. They want to turn the climbing frame into a cathedral. They pull off the children’s faces like balaclavas. * The sound the men make as they turn the climbing frame into a cathedral: MMMPIC-MMPIC-MPIC-PIC MMMPIC-MMPIC-MPIC-PIC-PIC


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Offstage a woman walking her bitch implies the sound is unorthodox. The men kill her and swap her face with a balaclava which they pull off when the bleak cameras arrive. The men’s official statement is read by a bear dressed as a priest:

Offstage is irrelevant to proceedings. This corpse did not exist until our spotlights appeared and nothing happens until we turn our spotlights on. Who cares what happens before our spotlights are turned on? This happens too often for us to take account of. When this happens so regularly this becomes a redundancy and this enters into the background noise of every day life as if this is the birdsong we stopped hearing in childhood. This woman had no distinguishing features and the only thing that will outlive her presence is this bitch and who cares about this? Why should we talk about the rights of a bitch when there are more pressing matters to attend to? Please go away, our spotlights have been switched off.

Above the noise of the men turning the climbing frame into a cathedral

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the children are turning their heads to listen. What can they hear? What is it we have forgotten how to hear? * Today’s children in the park are discussing whether they want a cathedral. They want a cathedral as much as they want a climbing frame. They want neither, truly they want neither, but nothing is worse than something monstrous. Cathedral, climbing frame? Should they care? They care about the right to choose how and when their climbing frame is turned into a cathedral. * The men decide to obliterate the word for park. The site where the climbing frame has been situated


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is now no longer allowed to be called a park. The children’s parents – who are all called Mark and Violetta – complain to the men. They are all called Mark and Violetta and there are millions of them. How can these children have so many parents all called Mark and Violetta? ‘And when will it end?’ asks Mark. ‘And where are our daughters?’ adds Violetta. Violetta is not the only one to notice that her children are all daughters and the men, well, they are what they are. They want to kill and what they are is monstrous as monstrous as the climbing frame in the park.

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GARETH TWOSE from Top Ten Tyres Ltd 24. (Clockwise from left to right: swimming in Siberia; skiing down a volcano; retrieving a skin sample from a whale; playing the piano.) Only he wasn’t and the butterfly stroke had been squeegeed, half erased. He took off his top: an image from Photoshop. Ruth momentarily reflected on the mess Mr Morris had made of the leader’s face work smoothed out so much it was unrecognizable until you looked for the eerie resemblances & his younger self skiing a slope in Chill Factor, swimming in a lido


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JACK UNDERWOOD Our Glorious Leader Putin Look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just shot a rare Siberian Tiger with a dart gun! Surely he is at one with/connected to/master of nature at its most fierce. And look look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just spoken fluent goose to some rare migrating geese as he flies adjacently to them in a light aircraft, wearing a beak, leading them to safety, just as he metaphorically leads our nation with a cool, authoritative dignity. Look now! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just woken up and thumped out two hundred loaves of dough in a masculine and serious way, to be baked for the starving old people. And look look! A crowd of beautiful women sing how they wish their boyfriends were as conscientious and as traditionally masculine as OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN as they shake their feminine behinds respectfully at his motorcade silly girls. Ah wow look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has been diving in the sea with his shirt off showcasing his masculine figure to his country and the World as he finds some ancient artefacts on the seabed again. And bravo! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN throws a lesser man in Judo! Whoof! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN rides a horse masterfully with his shirt off!

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Listen! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN is laughing at a joke, displaying to our country and the World that despite possessing a overall masculinity of impregnable steel, he is able to laugh at an authorised joke somebody has made in line with the concerns and beliefs of OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN. And see OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just masturbated in the shower, in line with the recommendations of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation. After all, he is nearly only a man, for which this is ordinary behaviour. Observe now how OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN cleans his penis after with a q-tip, so tidily and neatly, as if he were erasing a small secret from his past as a KGB hero/agent. And now OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN is drinking a glass of his own delicious and superior vodka brand PUTINKA. Surely there is no other vodka brand currently available on the market that typifies the drinking requirements of an actual Russian man. And imagine that as OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN swallows the cold-hot transparency of it, he opens his ears to himself and hears not one dissenting voice from within; thusly closing the wound of each of his thoughts with the same brute salve of his sure and right reflection.


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STEVE WALING Mesostic: Prayer Christ of Revolution and Poetry – David Gascoyne, ‘Ecce Homo’

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TONY WALSH Because the Poets Know Because the poets know Because the poets feel Because the poets understand Because the poets think Because the poets see Because the poets take a stand Because the poets move Because the poets stir Because the poets write it down Because the poets blaze Because the poets rage Because the poets say it loud

And some may abhor us And some just ignore us And sometimes we suffer slings But some times they laud us And some lands applaud us And sometimes they crown us kings But some raid our stages And some burn our pages And some throw us into cells And sometimes they tape us And sometimes they rape us And some die in living hells And sometimes we’re banished And sometimes we’re vanished And some drive us from our lands


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And some persecute us And some execute us And some chop off poets’ hands And sometimes we’re tortured And sometimes we’re slaughtered And some cut out poets’ tongues But sometimes they hear us And sometimes they cheer us And sometimes they sing our songs

Because the poets know Because the poets feel Because the poets understand Because the poets think Because the poets see Because the poets take a stand Because the poets move Because the poets stir Because the poets write it down Because the poets blaze Because the poets rage Because the poets say it loud

If you are a poet If I am a poet If we are all poets, say loud: ‘Your pressure and violence will beat neither silence nor soul from a poet.’ Stand proud!

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MICHAEL WELLER Ida Lupino Comix


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TIM WELLS Lucy Parsons An hour’s work at minimum wage earns a fellow £6.08p. As a pint of beer, in one of the cheaper London pubs, is £3.60 this won’t get you two pints even. A gallon of petrol is £6.09p. That’s not anarchy, that’s economics. June 2012


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JT WELSCH Prayer in Sickness If only prison held what frightens us. If only the dyke were dry or we weren’t running out of pricks. If only a system and oh, father, not to wake alone and won’t this save me?

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GINNA WILKERSON A Young Girl’s Dream Just before the gate stood the looming man dressed in very pale blue. I couldn’t see his face. I asked if he wanted to rape me. He heated a pan of tar, took a scalpel from his boot but never removed his trousers. He told me to stand very still – it would go better for me, he said. I always imagined girls had to lie down for rape. He had a sort of poker for the tar – I touched my tender core with two fingers, feeling it already burnt and ruined. I stood very still like a good girl. I fell face forward to the ground. Three very small girls, miniature even, peered into my face. They ran away like tiny St. Bernards. I stayed still on the walkway, facedown. My brothers came then and bundled my rapist to the police

station. They know nothing – they say nothing. I lay motionless on the rough, cool sidewalk, breathing the dust.


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ALISON WINCH Cunt Haikus Capital of sex: at the size of his wallet she pursed her pussy. * Not a hole or lack, but a fat profiterole. Come here. Eat me. Come. * Breakfast: spread them like peanut butter. Take a bite: salty, sweet – the nut. * Not penis envy or clitoral shame, but our collaboration.

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ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN ‘Phil Ochs sang’ Phil Ochs sang ‘I can’t be singing louder than the guns when I’m gone… so I guess I have to do it while I’m here.’ And so, still, the need, and you tread again this path of the long tradition, that which insists, until a world which sheds its soundproof cloak.


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VERONICA ZUNDEL Prayer and Pussy Riot Have Three Letters in Common So here I am in church, a Mennonite church: a tradition which includes women in plain dress and headscarves and elder-prescribed spriggy fabric patterns; men in beards but never military moustaches and trouser braces but never gun-toting belts; buggies and stationary diesel engines, mobiles but no world-linked landlines laptops but maybe not the internet – not to mention debates on the sinfulness of buttons and a long slow walk to the twenty-first century and it’s Sunday and here we are praying together, out loud, by name for Pussy Riot. And God is smiling.

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LETTERS FROM PUSSY RIOT For the 9 September 2012 Free Pussy Riot Fundraiser Concert held at Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen in London, organisers SHATTERJAPAN specially requested personal handwritten letters from jailed Pussy Riot members Masha, Katya and Nadia. We were astonished and emotional when we received the letters – they are full of such passion, hope, courage and compassion. The original Russian letters were read by former editor and producer for the BBC Russian Service Masha Karp. The English translations are by Sophie Gug of Die Hexen.

– Olivia Mayumi Moss Watch the reading: http://youtu.be/XkdKMfI15To Shatterjapan’s Pussy Riot news site: http://www.shatterjapan.com/category/blog/pussy-riot/ Letter from Maria Alyokhina Dear Friends! We were very happy to hear about your support in London. At the moment, seeing such thoughtfulness and diligence is crucial for us. I am certain that together, one way or another, we will be able to influence the political power and make Russia slightly more liberated. Your support inspires and strengthens our determination. A huge thank you to everyone! Thanks to you, instead of incarceration, we feel our collective freedom. 31st August 2012 Masha


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Letter from Yekaterina Samutsevich Hi there, Pussy Riot comrades of London! Your support, so important at this time, has made us infinitely happy and inspired. Right now, a cold Autumn begins in Russia, but our hearts are warmed by the sincere support we see all over the world. We also hope that many people in our country will be warmed by this ‘season of opposition’ which will help bring freedom to our country. I wish you all energy and freedom in creativity. Sending warmest greetings from this Russian penitentiary, Katya Letter from Nadezha Tolokonnikova Hi, Pussy Riot friends of London! Thank you for your support! What you are doing is invaluable to us – you are broadening the incarcerated world of our women’s penitentiary. Acts of support are a miracle to us – our world grows larger, no longer restrained by the suffocating and dark walls of the prison cell, because we are one with you! We are in confinement, but have a lot of strength, and I would like to share the infinite power of Pussy Riot with you all. Be inspired and create politics of liberation! Good luck! Wishing you a bright, strong and political September! Nadya

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CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR is a poet, performer and fiction writer. Most recently she has performed at the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival. www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/21710/Sascha-Aurora-Akhtar SANDRA ALLAND is a writer, performer and intermedia artist sometimes living in Scotland. For more info on her work go to www.blissfultimes.ca. For a musical and filmic interpretation by Zorras of Sandra’s poem ‘Weapons of Minor Destruction,’ www.youtube.com/stumblintongues TIM ATKINS is the editor of online poetry journal onedit. His recent books include Petrarch (Barque), Folklore (Salt) and Horace (O Books) His favourite pussy is Krazy Kat/Phil Whalen. ANDREW BAILEY is a writer based in Sussex, with a first collection, Zeal, available from Enitharmon. He has worked with various arts and educational organisations. His favourite pussy is currently Krosp. SUE BIRCHENOUGH, aka Tortoiseshell Mog, lives in Derbyshire. She likes pushing the envelope by the seat of her pants. She has uncharacteristic outpawring. SIRAMA BAJO is a poet and translator from Nicaragua, via Puerto Rico. Her favourite pussy would have to be the ferocious jaguar. She lives with her partner in Oakland, CA. www.siramabajo.blogspot.com RICHARD BARRETT lives and works in Salford. His poetry has appeared in a wide range of print and online publications and he can be frequently found reading his work at events


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across the UK. His favourite pussy is the cat from the opening credits of Coronation Street. MARK BURNHOPE’s pamphlet collection, The Snowboy, is published by Salt. He knows the Deep Magic and his favourite pussy is Aslan. WAYNE BURROWS is a writer based at Primary Studios, Nottingham, and his most recent book, The Apple Sequence, resulted from a collaboration with the visual artist Neville Gabie. His favourite feline is Leonor Fini. wayneburrows.wordpress.com. DAVID CADDY’s most recent books are So Here We Are (Shearsman, 2012) and The Bunny Poems (Shearsman, 2011). He edits Tears in the Fence. His favourite pussy is Siamese. JEN CAMPBELL is the author of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops. Her poetry collection, The Hungry Ghost Festival, is published by The Rialto. jen-campbell.blogspot.com THEODOROS CHIOTIS’ work has appeared in Adventures in Form, Tears in the Fence, CANCAN, Otoliths, Bad Robot Poetry et. al.. His favourite pussy is Gummitch from Fritz Leiber’s Space-time for Springers. KAREN CONNELLY is a Canadian novelist, nonfiction writer, and poet. Her novel The Lizard Cage, about a Burmese protest singer, won the Orange Prize for First Novels in 2007. Her favourite pussy is called Cunt. www.karenconnelly.ca JENNIFER COOKE is a London-based poet and an academic who lectures in and publishes on modern and contemporary literature and theory at Loughborough University, UK.

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REBECCA CREMIN is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Royal Holloway investigating site specific and feminist performance poetics. Her pussy love is ‘ziggy’ who currently resides in Saudi Arabia. SARAH CREWE is a poet from the Port of Liverpool. Her pamphlet, Aqua Rosa, is available from erbacce-press and she has a collection, flick invicta, forthcoming with Oystercatcher in 2013. Her favourite pussy is the Cheshire Cat. ALISON CROGGON is a poet, critic and novelist who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her most recent poetry collection is Theatre (Salt). www.alisoncroggon.com PHILIP DAVENPORT is part of The Gingerbread Tree, an art collective based in North West England. Their ongoing epic visual poem THE SENIOR PRACTICAL EDUCATOR is the source of ‘This is a free riot,’ which has been illegally billposted in Manchester. His favoured feline is Behemoth in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. TIM DOOLEY’s poems are collected in Keeping Time (2008) and Imagined Rooms (2010), both published by Salt. He is reviews editor for Poetry London and works as a creative writing tutor for The Poetry School and an arts mentor for The Koestler Trust. His favourite pussy is Top Cat. BETTY DOYLE is 17 and from the Wirral. She is currently dancing along to the Sex Pistols. Her favourite pussy is probably her best friend’s cat Suki – probably the most fierce feline you’ll ever meet – although Kitty Purry is also damn fine. SASHA DUGDALE is a poet and translator. She has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of these is Red House (Carcanet, 2011). She is editor of Modern Poetry in


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Translation. Her favourite pussy is Бегемот from The Master and Margarita. LAURENCE EBERSOLE engages human rights & poetry for the 98% with his advocacy. He is a West Coaster in Seattle. His favourite pussy is Siamese. AMY EKINS is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She has just finished her MRes in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. Her favourite pussy is Alfie, a fat, non-gendered cat she used to live with and sees from time to time. CHRIS EMSLIE is assistant editor at ILK. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma, Fuselit and PANK, among others. One of his life’s ambitions is to spend an afternoon lint-watching with his favourite pussy, Sabrina’s familiar Salem. www.ilkjournal.com JOHN ENNIS is working on verse responses to numbers by Sìgur Rós, Jónsi, and Jónsi & Alex. He hopes to publish these early in 2013. His favourite pussy is a Black Persian. AMY EVANS’ recent publications include Viersome #01 (Veer, 2012) and Collecting Shells (Oystercatcher, 2011). Her favourite pussy is shouty Megan, who drinks from the fish tank. GARETH EVANS is a writer, editor at Go Together Press, www.gotogetherpress.com, and film curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Favourite cats: August, Bob and the double duo. KATY EVANS-BUSH’s poetry collections are Me and the Dead, Egg Printing Explained, and Oscar & Henry. Her blog, baroqueinhackney.com, was shortlisted for the 2012 George Orwell Prize. Favourite pussy: Mehitabel, from Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis: ‘toujours gai kid toujours gai.’

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SJ FOWLER has published four collections of poetry and has been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor at 3am magazine, edits the Maintenant series and works at the British Museum. www.sjfowlerpoetry.com KIT FRYATT was born in Tehran in 1978, grew up in Singapore, Turkey and England, and lived in Ireland between 1999 and 2012. She now lives in Scotland. Her favourite pussy is the Cat that Walked by Himself. wurmimapfel.net/about-kit-fryatt LUCY FURLONG is currently completing her MFA in creative writing at Kingston University. Her favourite pussy is Maria Alyokhina. www.lucyfurlong.com CHARLOTTE GEATER lives in London. She is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing. Her favourite pussy is the tabby cat, of course. twitter.com/tambourine JAY GRIFFITHS is the award-winning author of Pip Pip, Wild, and A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. She lives in Wales. www.jaygriffiths.com HEL GURNEY writes about sex, mythology, and landscapes. It is perhaps inevitable that Hel’s favourite pussy has long been Bastet. helgurney.wordpress.com KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE is a poet based in Oxford. Her favourite pussy cat is her own, a ginger runt called Noodle. www.kiranmh.co.uk STEVEN HEIGHTON is a poet, fiction writer, and translator. His poems have appeared in the LRB, Poetry, London


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Magazine, and Best American Poetry 2012. He lives in Canada. www.stevenheighton.com SOPHIE HERXHEIMER’s ink drawings include a woman-size paper maché concrete poem about Mrs Beeton next to her grave. She has illustrated five collections of fairy tales (Russian ones are best) and most recently she has produced an artist’s book, Hurricane Butter. Elvis is her favourite cat. SARAH HESKETH has a history of protest having worked as Assistant Director at English PEN for 5 years. She currently works as Events and Publications Manager at the Poetry Translation Centre in London. Her favourite cat is Pangur Ban. www.sarahhesketh.co.uk JEFF HILSON’s recent publications include The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed., Reality Street, 2008), Bird bird (Landfill, 2009) and In The Assarts (Veer, 2010). He teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University, and runs the reading series Xing the Line. Kater Murr is his favourite pussy. ADAM HOROVITZ’s debut collection, Turning, was published by Headland in 2011. His favourite pussy is his cat Houdini, who really is riotously good at escaping from things. PETER HUGHES is a poet & also runs Oystercatcher Press. He has never much liked cats or swans. RAY HSU ≠ thewayofray.com PHILO IKONYA. Kenyan. A poet and novelist who lives in exile in Norway. Author of Out of Prison: Love Songs. KIRSTEN IRVING is one of the editors at Sidekick Books and Fuselit magazine. Her collection, Never Never Never Come

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Back, is forthcoming from Salt. Her favourite pussy is cardboard box fetishist Maru. www.drfulminare.com GENOWEFA JAKUBOWSKA-FIJAŁKOWSKA was born in Mikołów, Poland. She has published seven books of poetry, and has recently been translated into Czech, Slovene, English, German and Russian. Her favourite pussy was Teodor; she misses him daily. MARIA JASTRZĘBSKA’s most recent collection was Everyday Angels (Waterloo Press, 2009), At The Library of Memories is forthcoming. She is the co-translator of Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar (Pighog Press, 2011). Her favourite pussies have been two loves of her life: Kizia and Nocka. TOM JENKS curates ZimZalla, a publishing project intermittently releasing avant objects. He also co-organises The Other Room reading series in Manchester, and his collections, A Priori and * are published by if P then Q. His favourite pussy is Tony Hadley. ANTONY JOHN’s poetry has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. A collection of his poems, now than it used to be, but in the past was published by Veer in 2009. His favourite pussy is Donskoy. PHILL JUPITUS (PORKY THE POET) started performing in 1983 and has been an infrequent presence ever since. This year he performed for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe. His favourite pussy is Burmese; like the regime, they are surprisingly oppressive. AMY KEY’s pamphlet Instead of Stars is published by tall-lighthouse. She blogs at Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat. Her favourite pussycat is Pussycat of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ fame. insteadofstars.tumblr.com/


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JOHN KINSELLA is an anarchist, vegan, pacifist poet. JO LANGTON’s chapbook is entitled [fill the silence]. She is the creator of ZimZalla object 015, PoeTea. She prefers humans to cats. MELISSA LEE-HOUGHTON’s first collection, A Body Made of You is published by Penned in the Margins. She hopes that Behemoth will soon descend on the Powers-that-Be and avenge Pussy Riot! DEBORAH LEVY is a poet, playwright, novelist and author of the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. She lives in London. www.deborahlevy.co.uk IRA LIGHTMAN made public art throughout the New Labour era, and is back to writing poetry. His favourite pussies sing ‘We are Siamese if You Please’ in Lady and the Tramp. FRANCESCA LISETTE is a poet who currently lives & works in London. She has no favourite pussy, because she falls in love with each one she meets. M. LÝ-ELIOT is a singer, poet and reflector of East Asian culture. Her favourite pussy is the one on the estate that pounces from behind the bushes when she comes home late. ALEX MACDONALD lives and works in London. He runs Selected Poems blog selectedpoems.wordpress.com. More of Alex’ poetry audienceonvideo.tumblr.com MELISSA MACK lives in Oakland, California. She tries to practice radical imagination in all her ways. Her favourite pussy is her niece Olivia when they play kittens together.

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CHRISTODOULOS MAKRIS was born in Nicosia and has lived in Manchester, London and since 2001 in Dublin. His books include Spitting Out the Mother Tongue (Wurm Press, 2011) and the artist’s book Muses Walk. yesbutisitpoetry.blogspot.com AOIFE MANNIX is the author of four collections of poetry and a novel, Heritage of Secrets. She has been poet in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. www.aoifemannix.com BARBARA MARSH is the author of Crossing the Bone Bridge: Ruth Stone and the Language of Grief. Her collection, To the Boneyard (Eyewear) will appear in 2013. She is one of the founders of The Dear Janes and currently a member of experimental band Vachement Bath. Her favourite pussy is Lulu Cat. AGNES MARTON is a Hungarian-born poet. She participates in art projects such as Opposition (USA) and Appeal 2012 (South Africa). Her publications include Sculpture/poésie, Gateway and The New Encyclopaedia of Hungarian Literature (co-author). Her favourite pussy is Maru the Cat. SOPHIE MAYER’s books are The Private Parts of Girls (Salt), Kiss Off (Oystercatcher), Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman) and The Cinema of Sally Potter (Wallflower). Her favourite pussy is Varjak Paw. www.sophiemayer.net SALLY MCALISTER is a heavily tattooed nerd-writer. She runs the feministo-cultural magazine The Nerdy Virginias www.thenerdyvirginias.com and is a visual artist. Her heart beats for Maria Alyokhina’s literature. MICHELLE MCGRANE’s collection The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop (UK) and Modjaji (South Africa). She blogs at peonymoon.wordpress.com. Her favourite pussy is


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Christopher Smart’s Jeoffrey, ‘for he can tread to all the measures upon the music.’ MICHAEL MCKIMM’s poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines in the UK, Ireland and USA including Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions) and Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt). His favourite pussy is Hobbes. www.michaelmckimm.co.uk DREW MILNE is a founder member of the Institute of Electric Crinolines, and his books of poetry include: Sheet Mettle, Bench Marks, The Damage, Go Figure and Blueprints and Ziggurats (forthcoming). drewmilne.tripod.com/ A.F. MORITZ’s most recent book of poems is The New Measures (2012). His poetry has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and other honours. His favourite pussy is Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. HELMUTH NIEDERLE. Austrian. Writer, anthropologist, and English-German translator. President of Austrian PEN. BARBARA NORDEN is a playwright and poet. Her other plays include Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4 in 2011. REDELL OLSEN is a poet based in the UK. Her book Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel was published by Subpress in 2012 redellolsen.co.uk/wordpress/ RYAN ORMONDE is a member of press free press with Rebecca Cremin. He is his own favourite pussy. poeticpracticejournal.blogspot.co.uk SANDEEP PARMAR is Lecturer in twentieth-century literature at the University of Liverpool. Her first collection, The Marble Orchard, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2012.

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ANNA PERCY is a poet based in Manchester. She is one half of Stirred Poetry, a feminist duo whose first anthology is out next year. She is the author of two chapbooks and has been writing for performance and publication for eight years. www.mostlynocturnalscribbler.wordpress.com JODY PORTER is poetry editor of socialist daily newspaper the Morning Star. His favourite pussy is Hobbes. alldeciduousthings.tumblr.com FRANCES PRESLEY’s recent publications include Myne: New and Selected Poems and Prose, 1976-2005 (Shearsman, 2006) and Lines of Sight (Shearsman, 2009). Her favourite pussy is Tilla Brading’s rescue moggy, called Beanie, because she was found as a kitten with her head in a tin of beans. KAREN PRESS is a Canadian poet who teaches writing in Winnipeg. Her most recent book is Types of Canadian Women (Gaspereau Press, 2006). Her favourite pussy is definitely The Cheshire Cat, but shouts also must go out to the Cats of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. KATY PRICE’s poems have appeared in Seam, Blackbox Manifold, and recent collections on ekphrasis and LGBTQ spirituality. She is sharpening her claws as a lecturer in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. katyprice.wordpress.com ANA PULTENEY lives in deepest Devon. She wrote her first ‘pome’ two years ago prompted by the fitting of a dental brace. She is influenced by Benjamin Zephaniah and Pam Ayres. CHELLA QUINT is a comedy writer and performer, artist, activist, and old school zine girl from Brooklyn, New York who now lives in Sheffield, England. She is most well known for her


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adbusting comedy fanzine Adventures in Menstruating. Her favourite pussy is Ajsing Bajsing. www.chellaquint.com RED OF THE VAGINELLAS is a 30-something mother-of-two, former journalist, fiction writer and poet. Her first poetry collection Into the Yell (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010) won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. www.sarah-james.co.uk SELINA ROBERTSON is a freelance film programmer and writer. She is co-founder of Club Des Femmes, a queer-feminist film club. www.clubdesfemmes.com SOPHIE ROBINSON is a London-based poet and artist. Her first book, a, was published by Les Figues press in 2009. Her favourite pussy is her own. SHELAGH M. ROWAN-LEGG is a Toronto-born, Europe-based writer & film journalist, currently writing her PhD at King’s College London. Her favourite pussy is Pyewacket, from Bell Book & Candle. FATHIEH SAUDI is a poet and author. She has published three poetry collections and has received several awards for her cultural and humanitarian work including Chevalier de l’order du Merite from France. She is also a board member of English PEN and Exiled Writers Ink. JOHN SIDDIQUE is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Full Blood. His work has featured in many places, including Granta, The Guardian, Poetry Review and BBC Radio 4. His favourite pussy cats are those drawn by Louis Wain www.johnsiddique.co.uk ADRIAN SLATCHER lives in Manchester and writes poetry, fiction and music. He published 2 chapbooks in 2010, has a

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poem forthcoming in The Rialto, and blogs about literature at www.artoffiction.blogspot.com. DANIEL SLUMAN is a 25 year old poet based in Cheltenham, UK. His debut collection, Absence Has a Weight of its Own was published by Nine Arches Press in 2012. His favourite pussy is Garfield. ALI SMITH is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist and literary advocate. She lives in Cambridge. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Smith BARBARA SMITH is a poet, reviewer and tutor living in Ireland with a large family and an equally large food bill. She is an enthusiastic performer of her work with the Poetry Divas collective and her second collection is The Angels’ Share. TOM SPENCER teaches American literature in Montgomery, Alabama. His reviews and criticism have appeared in the TLS, American Literature, The National, and elsewhere. His favourite pussy is Jennyanydots. JON STONE co-runs a small press, Sidekick Books, with a focus on collaborative projects. He won a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and has published a full length collection, School of Forgery. His favourite pussy is Cheetara www.gojonstonego.com GEORGE SZIRTES was born in Hungary in 1948 and came to England with his family in 1956 following the Hungarian Uprising. He is the author of many books including Reel, T. S. Eliot Prize winner in 2004, and The Burning of the Books, shortlisted in 2009. His new book, Bad Machine, is forthcoming in 2013, and his book of poems for children, In the Land of the Giants, has just appeared.


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ANDREW TAYLOR’s collection Radio Mast Horizon is forthcoming from Shearsman. He lives in Liverpool and co-edits erbacce and erbacce-press. His favourite pussies are Smokey and Alf, both sadly not with us any longer. www.andrewtaylorpoetry.com PHILIP TERRY is the author of the poetry collections Oulipoems, Oulipoems 2, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Dante’s Inferno and Advanced Immorality. His favourite pussy is the leopard. SARAH THOMASIN is a performance poet and sexual health worker from Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Her favourite pussy is Tobermory, from the eponymous Saki short story. wordgeekery.wordpress.com CLAIRE TRÉVIEN’s first pamphlet is Low-Tide Lottery (Salt, 2011) and her first collection will be The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013). She edits Sabotage Reviews sabotagereviews.com. Her favourite pussy is tortoiseshell. GEORGE TTOOULI lives in Coventry. His debut collection of poetry is Static Exile (Penned in the Margins). He co-edits blogzine Gists & Piths with Simon Turner. His favourite pussy is Audrey, a short haired domestic who lives with him. GARETH TWOSE is organiser of Writers’ Forum North, an experimental poetry writing workshop based in Manchester. Co-organiser of recent Manchester Poets for Pussy Riot event. STEVEN WALING is the author of Calling Myself On The Phone (Smith/Doorstop), Travelator (Salt) and Captured Yes (Knives, Forks and Spoons), with loads of poems in magazines and on the net. His favourite pussy is a cat called Floyd who likes to sit in the bathroom sink.

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TONY WALSH, aka Longfella, is an acclaimed freelance poet, writer and educator, working nationally and internationally from his base in Manchester, UK. www.longfella.co.uk MIKE WELLER drew weekly political cartoon Blunderworld over twenty years ago, when Hollywood first discovered box-office potential in movies with masked superheroes. In one comic strip a riotous pussy is introduced... Catgirl. TIM WELLS likes reggae, beer and poetry. His favourite pussy is the ket flep. JT WELSCH is Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at York St John University. His most recent chapbook is Waterloo. His favourite pussy is Impractical. www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/jtwelsch GINNA WILKERSON is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at University of Aberdeen. Her poems have been published in journals including Gertrude, Chroma, Causeway/Cabhsair, Gutter and Northwords Now. Her favourite pussy is her cat Rosemary, who is helping to write the thesis. ALISON WINCH has had work featured in Magma, Brittle Star and on the Great British Bard Off website. She would love to partner up with an owl and take her pussy out in a pea green boat. ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN is a writer, film-maker and cultural activist. She lives in London. Her prime felines are August and Bob... and Vigo (who is a dog, but she has enabled the kittens to think that they can also be dogs too; and vice versa). www.fugitiveimages.org.uk


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VERONICA ZUNDEL is the author or compiler of seven books, a regular and award-winning magazine columnist, and an occasionally published poet. She lives in North London with a husband, teenage son and large fluffy Birman pussy named Pippin.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The following have been published previously and appear here with the authors’ permission: Sandra Alland, ‘Weapons of Minor Destruction,’ earlier versions

published in anything anymore anywhere (Spring 2011) and make/shift (Spring 2008).

Karen Connelly, untitled poem, adapted from The Lizard Cage (Harvill Secker, 2007).

Alison Croggon, ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ from Theatre (Salt, 2009) and Torque (Ahadada, 2007).

Adam Horovitz, ‘The Blackbird’ from Turning (Headland, 2011). Genowefa Jakubowska-Fijałkowska, ‘We Jew Women,’ trans. Marek

Kazmierski, from of me a worm and of the worm verses (off press, 2012).

Maria Jastrzębska, ‘Annunciation’ from Everyday Angels (Waterloo Press, 2009).

Ira Lightman, ‘Venus’ Hair’ and ‘Soutien-Gorge’ from I, Love Poetry (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2012).

Christodoulos Makris, ‘Sleepwalker on Stage’ from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue (Wurm Press, 2011).

Helen Moore, ‘Cunt Magic’ from Hedge Fund (Shearsman, 2012). Redell Olsen, ‘Stuff Your Piney Whispers’ from Punk Faun: a bar rock

pastel (Subpress, 2012). Frances Presley, ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in Parliament,’ Roundyhouse 32

(2011). Karen Press, ‘Strange’ as ‘My Word,’ Geist 83 (Winter 2011). Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg, ‘You Are Here,’ Taddle Creek (Summer

2004). John Siddique, ‘Thirst’ and ‘Unwritten’ from Full Blood (Salt, 2011). Barbara Smith, ‘Pair Bond,’ from The Angels’ Share (Doghouse, 2012). Gareth Twose, ‘Top Ten Tyres Ltd,’ Leafe (2012).

catechism: poems for pussy riot

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