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Liam Bates
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the poet
Originally from the Black Country and now living in Lancashire, Liam Bates is a poet whose work has appeared in Ambit, Bath Magg, Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Latvian, and in 2023 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for ongoing work. Liam's first two pamphlets, Monomaniac and Working Animals, are available from Broken Sleep Books, as is his debut collection, Human Townsperson.
the poems
The Agency
I ate the mushroom
growing on the wall of the downstairs toilet
in the house we rent. I folded
a thick slice of brown bread around it
and gobbled the lot raw. They might try
charging us extra at the end of our tenancy
because the mushroom wasn’t meant for us.
But in their assessment, what is? See
what I have in my hands. It’s nothing.
See it moving. Like devotees
bowing round a colourful altar.
They forbid us painting over the white
but I painted anyway on the white
of the sink with the rainbow
of my vomit. I am
thirteen again. I am hovering
a foot above the ground like a god. They don’t want us
skating on their office block steps as if
the concrete isn’t there for us. Smooth
as a dream of endless falling. Shouting
watchmen emerging to shoo us off the premises.
What are they thinking,
that they can contain this? It’s only
my folded arms holding me together.
If I raise my hands towards the sky,
so bright and boundless I ache,
a thousand canaries will take flight.
Understudy
This again—my student has crammed
his pockets with gravel and
cannonballed into the reservoir.
Sopping, and cold as a milestone
on the bank, I take his word
this isn’t about suicidal thoughts,
he saw the tell-tale green and gold
of treasure blinking on the bed
and isn’t that what we’re doing here?
Sure, but wouldn’t growing gills
be covered during induction
if that was all it took? Tomorrow,
I’ll pull him from a different waterbody.
We’ll sit in the sun getting warmer.
Open Wide,
a Little Wider
We were misled
by a sat nav quirk, the circle
sun at an unexpected inclination.
The country’s vestigial tail,
you dubbed this snaking
A road. Still inevitably
a wealth of luxury cars on hand
ready to elbow by, tinted window
undertakers, cutting us up and getting
a mouthful: cunt, do your indicators not work
or are we invisible? The final word flashing
in their rear-view. And then we turned a corner
and on the hill opposite was a line
of houses, a familiar-seeming close
in a town we’d never been. You said,
Who do you think lives there?
and I knew then someone
must, a street of someones, each
with their own purposeful face. I had
to chew on it in a lay-by: the abundance,
it won’t all fit in my head. But
that’s the thing, you said, it doesn’t have to.
Publishing credits
All poems: Human Townsperson (Broken Sleep Books)