Download PDF Here 13th Anniversary
Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four December 2022.
After Vincent, poems by Gail Ingram.
After Vincent
You hold your brush like a spade
across your knee as if for leverage
you gaze at the sky closing in on itself
in blue and yellow spirals, opening,
closing, opening again to the seedling
hills tumbling like weeds, the sparrows
alarming in your rigid presence,
the hallucinatory vibrating of the
sun you want to envelope
along with the flowers, the buffeting swells,
the water turning to bone
in the knock and twist
of your prideful wrist – let go!
let go! let go!
you are the paper
you are the sun
all you will be
nothing in the maw
of the spinning galaxy.
R 18 at last!
In the 1980s when The Movies were an outing and we
Came of Age, we entered
the heavy open doors of The Embassy,
arm-in-arm, a frisson of anticipation
between us –
innocent
of the cushions up there
of the pale thighs and plum,
cushioning
so pale, so plum, so large up there
on the big screen, the cushions
upon cushions of thigh and tit-
illation so large
in soft focus
through
we came to realise
and for
the lens
of Man
we sat like dummies
for two-and-a-half hours
while He gave Her
no name, nor voice.
Our 18-year-old selves
left the cinema, the smog crawled
around Cathedral Square in the dark,
goosepimples bared our arms,
our contracted hearts.
© Gail Ingram
Gail Ingram is an award-winning writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and author of Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Her work has appeared in The Spinoff, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, Love in the Time of Covid, takahē, Cordite Poetry Review, Blue Nib, Barren Magazine, Live Encounters and others. She is an editor for New Zealand Poetry Society Te Rōpū Toikupu of Aotearoa’s magazine a fine line and a short fiction editor for Flash Frontier. Other times, she is a creative-writing teacher to young writers. She enjoys writing poetry for nature, about family relationships and backing the underdog. https://www.theseventhletter.nz/