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watch video: Maggie Sawkins reading her poem The Cord

from Zones of Avoidance

 

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2013.
Poems from the production to be published by Cinnamon Press, Spring 2015.

 

Zones of Avoidance

     (a short extract)

I’m reading ‘The Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ –
I want to understand what drove my daughter out in the snow

with no coat or socks, in search of a fix.
I want to understand what divinity led her

to set up camp in the derelict ‘pigeon house’
after running out of sofas to surf.

     *

I was a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds girl myself.
I liked the way it made inanimate objects move,

until that day in Balham when my guy sang Rock n Roll Suicide
from a third floor window, and an Alsatian leapt

from the wood grain of the station door, and policemen
were penguins in disguise.

     *

Tough Love. The mantra of the support group for those
beaten by their loved one’s addiction.

When I was busted at nineteen and the bedsit landlord
tipped my belongings onto the street, the last person

I would’ve turned to was my mother.
You’ve made your bed. Lie on it. Lie on it. Lie on it.

 

Maggie Sawkins

 

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Hooked on Words

poetry favourites:
Tongues & Grooves
Cinnamon Press
Lewes Live Lit 

The Mike Allen Interview

shop elsewhere ...
collections-
"The Zig-Zag Woman",
Two Ravens Press;

"Charcot's Pet",
Flarestack

anthology -
"Four Caves of the Heart",
(Ed. Myra Schneider & Caroline Price), Second Light

featured in "Lost & Found Poems" CD, Tongues & Grooves

 


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