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Luke Palmer
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the poet
Poet, author and teacher Luke Palmer has written two poetry pamphlets: Spring in the Hospital – winner of the 2018 Prole Pamphlet Prize – and In all my books my father dies. His novels for young adults have been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for the Branford Boase award. In 2022, he won the Winchester Poetry Prize. Luke's debut poetry collection Homunculus is due out from Broken Sleep Books in early 2024.
the poems
Homunculus,
Potty Training
My father in his soiled apron
kneels to the rug I’ve soiled
sops it with caustic water
his cracked knuckles singing
so much soil and smut
while outside the earth stirs
the small machines rising
the shock of my own water
brings springs to my eyes and
father comforts me
says all water is blessed
is longing to fall
back to the centre and
the world’s in endless gyre
around a hollow middle
where God sits and
he rises up through everything
muddied by what he touches
but still inside everything
that seed spirit inherent and
I am a planet too
my divine core rising
to puddle on the kitchen floor
miraculous he says and smiles
his raw hands working the rug
beneath his knees and
my miraculous marks
Horse Mother
If [a human sperm] be fed wisely with the Arcanum
of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks,
and be kept in the even heat of the horse's womb,
a living human child grows therefrom.
Paracelsus – De Natura Rerum (1537)
O great and latinate mother there I was
haunched in your middle mired inside
the bloody knot of you fattened on plasma
plump little barrel the small bow
and tight stitch of my shimmering
translucent brain
I wanted to stay
squared in your uterus womb-warmed and duvet’d
galloped in your sternum stuffed and packed
wanted to be kept left to loll in your thick
limbic hedgerow cooped in that belly
never to be dealt but no
plans had been made the world opened
so big my mother O
so big and so so cold
Doomscrolling
Yes today has been the bluntest
cross legged at the kitchen window
the same view pressing on it
the sills are deep with flies ticking
consonants of small forms that
slowed against the glass then
shrunk their cursive rasp
at my fingernails only the fridge
hums now meanwhile the sky
is faultless with swifts I watch
vital parts of myself detach
lumber to the river where
they cease I squeeze greenfly
from the bud of every rose
in all my prosperous beds
until my fingers change colour
Publishing credits
Homunculus, Potty Training / Horse Mother:
exclusive first publication by iamb
Doomscrolling: Anthropocene