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Joanna Nissel

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the poet

Joanna Nissel was runner-up for the 2018 Poetry Business International New Poets Prize, Pick of the Month for Ink, Sweat, and Tears (July 2020), and won the 2020 Bangor Literary Journal Ekphrastic competition. She works as an organiser and facilitator of online literary events, including the Stay-at-Home! Literature Festival, Tears in the Fence Festival, and events with Paper Nations. Joanna’s debut poetry pamphlet, Guerrilla Brightenings, is forthcoming with Against the Grain Press.

the poems

Thoughts on
Mothers’ Day 2020

00:00 / 01:23
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                                                       This is not my first poem

                                                       about washing hands


          Dad learned the spell     of lipid-based soaps

          alcohol gel     cracked knuckle-skin

          to enter Dave’s hospice room

          festooned with cards     balloons


                                                       Did you know flower-water is so germ-ridden

                                                       it can be lethal?


          Twenty years earlier     the diagnosis

          then the fall down the stairs     cracked

          his skull     The friend who found him

          scrubbed her hands of his blood


                                                       The ritual of it     clutch of talismans

                                                       worn around the neck


          without knowing if it would protect her

          For Mothers’ Day     I sketched a bouquet

          of spring     daffodils     bluebells     roses

          hibiscus in biro     The last time I saw Dave


                                                       The groom's declaring

                                                       wickedness     laziness


          his wedding     my 11th birthday

          Buddha-bar-bling-themed ­     golds     fuchsia

          lighting rigs from the boys at the Old Vic

          They stopped the ensuing rave


                                                       February frost melting

                                                       against steamed windows


          to bring me a cake with candles

          that     when I blew on them

          relit themselves     never went out.

Delicious

00:00 / 00:43
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              She drops the word into conversation,

              sprawling and red like unfurling fire lilies.


              The audacity of it makes me stutter,

              and she, comfortable and languid-limbed,


              moves on to the next topic as if she hasn’t just

              released the scent of raspberries and honeysuckle


              into a rainy afternoon catch-up. Afterwards I wonder

              if I’ve just seen a glimpse of the world as she sees it,


              life in all its mundanities rippling across her taste buds:

              simply delicious. I find myself mouthing the word,


              revelling in the sibilance

              so petal-soft it burns.

It’s the Only Time
I See Them

On coming out – Hove Lawns

00:00 / 01:08
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              the lesbian couple, joining me to amble the pebbles at dawn,

              meandering the artery between one pier and the other.


              They’re gone by the time light proliferates, turns the world

              from fragile pinks, pale blues to brash cerulean and shamrock lawns,


              and the promenade has filled with clots of joggers,

              children with training wheels, shirtless beer bellies.


              I can’t blame them, when sunrise offers us a clear stretch

              of saturated sands, which shift underfoot like the texture of damp biscuits,


              which thrum with ancient energies and offer fragments of shells,

              whole ecosystems on the groynes, encrusted with mussels


              until the walls resemble the puffed wings of preening crows

              and the bright shallows under 7am sun overlap like scales.


              This morning, three women waded in and, as the water broke

              against their stomachs, they were Leo standing on the prow,


              the horizon building in them, building,

              until they released their screams.

Publishing credits

All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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