Reuben Love
Winner - 2019
I hoard images, fantasise about plagiarism, and think about sylphs all day. I like ugly magic in poetry and the day-to-day. I am in training don’t kiss me xx
- Reuben Love
LEROY
The piano enters on a bed,
serves as the seed
When Leroy and I come together
it will be like two grands, two
freshly made Steinways
unlocked
slotted like
returning Gondwanan subcontinents.
Us, transcontinental duettists
who are practicing separately,
will be watering
passagework
and not even look up.
The program will say
Pianistically it is miraculous
through the spray
The spray is the blindness
that comes during a soundjob.
Leroy
my horseplayer,
the king of leaving,
crawling up over the ice shove
in our wet-clothed
soundscape.
I will miss the dryness we had together,
like I miss Gondwanaland
and shoot an iceberg.
KATE BUSH IN THE SNOW
Kate Bush thinks about us lying
lying in Brontë drag
freezing cold, we had to
open the window in the freezing cold.
Zeus in drag
came in
dressed in fifty coins
that we slowly pocketed.
Our pussies are not slot machines.
What uninventive incognito
we all have tonight.
Bush enters the deep’nhidden
snow
she’s a snowsexual, like me,
she hits the vaseline.
She likes the cold
sheets that are soaking.
We like the not finding him,
the open window closing.
SISTERSHIP
In the last place I was the worm before the fairy
we had cars all over our garden,
like we were rehabilitating them.
The crops were not rotated,
because what was the garden going to grow, really?
We set cars free, slowly.
When I was the worm I led a chicken upstairs.
It transformed me in an instant to shit on the carpet,
pearled and glittery.
As the fairy of shit,
I stole my sister’s sighs.
I took them out to an open window
that I could swear was a beautiful window,
bottom-heavy from billions of years sagging,
and emptied the bucket
like the myth about the chamber pot
emptied on the medieval street.