the poet
Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Cook is an emerging poet who works in higher education and lives in Birmingham, England, with her partner and their slightly fat cat. She's had work considered for Magma, and her poem OCD recently appeared in the New Nottingham Journal. Lizzie writes about complicated grief, mental health issues and ecology, and is a RSPB volunteer.
the poems
Rea
After the River Rea, Birmingham
‘ree’ a stream, a brook, a river (1500-1857)
‘ea’ – a river; a body of running water (Old English)
(Oxford English Dictionary)
The first shock of spring:
Midges worry the wild garlic at my flanks
On the fetid, slow-flowing meander, where
The water lulls and pools and slackens.
Spawn, rich, ripe, and ready
Tucked away by webbed feet
Rests safe from the rollicking fray
Of tiny eddies and scummy froth.
See, here, the crunched cans of bitterest ale
Offy bags, spattered and split like caul fat
Along the scrubby, brushy bank
And wet concrete, smeared with soft moss.
Past the grasping roots of human-hood
I gribble and dribble down into the stinking sluice
Culverted under middleways, mollified
Through the ashen heart, I am lost.
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OCD
Bent, branch-like
Before my keeper and protector
A three-piece Armitage Shanks suite, swan faucets
Fingerprints waning
As sherbet on the tongue
Lumbar shattering, knuckles splitting.
It began with yellow.
The butter-dish, sly
With bloated cow in smeary resplendence
Gut frothing
Like one before fire or flood
Fear made flesh, hurtling
From dish to door to mouth.
I return to the foot of the mountain
Prostrate before my absurd tripartite:
Carex, Imperial Leather, Dove.
Only later, in the brown room
Do I gather up my cloak of obsessions,
Lay them bare at learned feet,
A mottled patchwork of sins.
Wayfound
I like my cities in Default View.
Squares of grey-green-blue a balm for the raucous brain:
Satellite feels indulgent in this world
where we have no time, there are places to be, but sometimes I linger
retrace steps, lurk in spaces in which I am no longer welcome
Stand at the foot of the steep driveway of a childhood home
Press ghostly hands to the glass of a bus-stop
Let tepid water swell around my ankles at the wide brackish pond or
Teeter in those velvet gardens, barefoot and trembling.
Sometimes, I fall into OS folds or AA grids
Trace nails along the curves-by-numbers of this land,
Plunge nose-first into lay lines and with no StreetView instead
Picture the rutted ground
Swelling upward beneath curled toes on
Hills I have known and those I do not -
See in the mind’s eye an inlet choked by sea-foam or some distant moor,
follow rivers and spurs with my fingertips.
When it all collapses,
I’ll need something of these skills again
In the meantime, Maps seems to think Work is somewhere in the North Sea.
In landlocked Coventry, I let the crests swell over me.
Publishing credits
Rea / Wayfound: exclusive first publication by iamb
OCD: New Nottingham Journal (Issue No.1)