Poems

from Incidents of Anti-Semitism by Steven J Fowler

 

#57

money was a hard arm, a death intoxicated nanny

a surrogate breast

clouds of guilt offer a glimpse of hell

then guilt, then a report on torture worldwide

from land onwards, we must fight to stamp it out

for this is the first time I saw people burning

the men stripped to his chest and stood in the aisle

the train just pulling out into golders green station

he was thick, softly muscular and wore

an equally muscular wooden cross around his neck

he began to tell us the real reason that we did not yet know…

 

#5

the son of a.spear stuck into the foot of the stairs talking

the wonderful glass table with gold inlay and her squatted across

gushing like a balloon for a child is cooing a divide coming

a purple lipped pouting and hiding likes its mother

I told her to get rid of it, for she’s so young to be under with out a kid on her

it is hard enough to be ethnic Russian jew of Kaunas

odd father of the fatter path blurred softly into a climber

whose hour left worn to count hairs on her belly

not laid chase to hair that is itself red grass

that’s where branches unbended land long the heir

& seeing love I ran from matchmakers & love

looks like a frightened  notch on a walked stick

shy   it looks a tiny strip of unperforated, beneath

where an oyster went garland, she is a red haired

laid down a path blurred in the eye or on the film of things, lens of seeing

restless late  ends missing swimming princess    common before, womb royal

sawn beyond the flesh a butcher in the mirror  eating lop

kosher leopard meat unskinned on the weekends

the tiny sparrow creature hiding in her head

the bellow she sits upon and wasting breath saying he is just trying to keep you!
out and that I joked when I said every poem

would be dedicated to your burn and my exploration of it
by which I meant and said art, to which she turned her lip

and laughed her head back and pointed ‘this is the arse

he is talking about’ what a shame to have a baby

to clog the passage of the dim light, but light,

were it not she fights a horse, dipping cat impressions

and putting on a first brick laid, drowned in smoke, sucking it in with tongue

then calling me a black con (in Russian) a hovering hand

who tried to kill her child with good advice

SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist & vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published five books and been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy, Penned in the Margins and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine and is the curator of the enemies project.