3:AM Magazine

These Polaroids were taken by my mother, who died unexpectedly at the age of 52 back in 2003. There is nothing written on them to indicate where they were taken. I have deduced that they are either from her travels around Europe or her time living in Canada, in the early 1970s. These snapshots (there were around 20 in total) got separated from a bag of family photos, perhaps as they had no people in them and were more focussed on the structural. Whatever the reason, they were put to one side. The family photos were later lost, whilst under my care, during a turbulent family time and a hedonistic period in my early 20s. So these cast-offs, of sorts, are all that remain. I recently came across them again in my belongings and started to think about texts that might work well with them. I thought about travel writing and novels about journeys etc. Then the lyrics of one of my mother’s favourite albums, Joni Mitchell, Blue, sprang to mind, for multiple reasons, themes of travel, tragedy, love and loss being some of them. So I started to experiment with words used in the lyrics of the album, defamiliarising and disrupting these songs I know so well, to fit the unfamiliar places in the pictures, that, in some way, at this time, represent my mother.

In the 76th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Vik Shirley.

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‘I wrote these on a day where I was ill and too tired to walk down the stairs. I felt vulnerable and empty. Writing helped to comfort myself a little. What I write, comes from the inside. I do not really think I just write down what I feel. I listen to my belly. These things would never come out of my mouth, but they do come from my body.’

In the 75th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ika Schwander.

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Two looks to the many maps published in recent years by a plethora of news outlets of Syria/Iraq, which show the shifts of geographic territory controlled by various governments, militias, and coalitions over time. It aims to combine the experience of reading these maps with fragments of individual story to create a multi-level portrait of the chaos, fear, boredom, and longing for stability that accompany armed conflict.

In the 74th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by C Harrison

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Bank of bitterness
If tomorrow
has to stop
today
L` aube se rendort
Mbess

In the 73rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Landa wo

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Lionel’s Star is a tiny, pink Planet that had been under the rule of Earth from 1948 until last year, in 2018, when they won a great war and overthrew their colonisers for good. There are six different languages spoken on the Planet and the texts above are translations into some of these languages. Some of the rules for translating this language to English are as follows.

1. If two words (in a row) begin with the same letter, omit that letter from the second word (and third and fourth etc). For example, “it is” becomes “it s”
2. A word cannot end in the same letter another begins with, so “she is sleeping” becomes ” she is leeping”
3. Definite articles indicate predictions, so the sentence “when the war comes” becomes ” when war comes” because we don’t actually want a war.

In the 72nd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Radha Patel.

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This suicide note was typed feverishly on my grandmother’s typewriter. I’m not suicidal, just to be clear. I only wondered what I’d say if I had to say something before offing myself. Turns out, not too much.

In the 71st of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Medha Singh.

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I’ve been a joiner for 20(!) years now spending a great deal of time looking at architectural drawings. A lot of my writing process is made up of notes scrawled on these drawings or on scraps of wood at my bench and these restrictions of thought and process have heavily influenced my forthcoming book Contained (Hesterglock Press). These four texts/drawings are ideas that I’m kicking around for the final manuscript.

In the 70th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by David Turner.

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“Sky Writing” is a multi-layered project.

We found the images — prints from a disposable camera — at a thrift store. I free-wrote on the images with marker, and Karolina “translated” my asemic writing into English.

I then letterpressed her text on Domtar Feltweave paper and attached the images, which I mounted on black card stock.

In the 16th of the Duos series and 69th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ryan Mihaly and Karolina Zapal.

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Do we think that it is sad and regrettable that such a charming family has to leave their house, but that there is simply nothing to be done?

We do, sadly.

Do we think the memories that a family has of the house they lived in mean nothing?

Of course not.

Do we think that those memories remain in the house, having seeped into the fabric of the building?

We think that probably a bit sentimental.

In the 68th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael O’Mahony.

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Awoken several times in the night for weeks, I began rising in the dark to write down my dreams. Sometimes it was easier to draw a line instead, to indicate something more of an affect or intensity. Other times the dreams were ripe with narrative. Mostly I was semi-conscious; everything was often a mess. I’d start to write of a moment and find the marks of a previous dream seeping through its surface, the bounds of one dream would bleed into the next. There was often the appearance of memory. I spilled black ink on my sheets, I fell asleep at the curl of an imprecise letter. These are some of the more legible pages.

In the 67th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Maria Sledmere.

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