#miriam gamble

[ramblingsthebookblog]

Found this poem in The Tangerine. "The girl with book and rubber band" by Mariam Gamble

[swallowtailedgull]

Sometimes Nothing

by Miriam Gamble

She never did it, the girl you were supposed to meet

in pink slippers and dressing gown

in what seemed the dead of night

after the world had gone to bed.

Sodium lights still garnished

the suburban street

with the gladsome hue of territory.

You waited on the curve of the road.

There was nothing in particular to see.

In what claimed to be the dead of night

you stood alone

at the mouth of her development;

sodium light still salad-dressed the street. What

were you waiting for?

You'd always known she wouldn't do it.

You leaned flimsily

against the curve of the road

where the remnants of a wood

you'd never had the name for scythed

on its cluttered stream

through the new developments,

and no bough juddered in the capricious night.

You stood gilded by the sodium light

as fat forms riffled through

your parents' garden;

you fought to keep yourself concealed

from the nothing that was there.

You wanted to go midnight walking. Where

were you going to walk to?

Through the developments, the pepper sniff of woods?

You, scuffing down the road

in you slippers and your wee fleece dressing gown.

You went home again, you climbed the creakless stair.

You dreamt the dreams that were appropriate.

[poem-today]

A poem by Miriam Gamble

Westering

Kiss me in this Ford Fiesta with the English number-plates, its nose dipping into hedgerows where the wet grass streaks off like a coat of vermicelli, sprinkling its loosened seeds around the mud-flaps, and the gush of brackish inexperience, everything that holds its breath to let us pass, smacks up from the gutters of the road. As we become a boomerang in orbit sent back over what precluded ground, what world that beckons and resists us. Kiss me as the hills enlarge and shrink, for I do not believe you when you say, on these pin bends I seem to handle with a ham fist, going both too quickly and too slowly to ever get my finger on the pulse of skies that steal their colours from abstraction, or towns where the weather is a citizen, still, and life a battle with its precepts, one long surrender to its loans. No (though spark me up a cigarette, and let faint smoke rings burgeon through my hair; your kiss is like a gateway onto childhood as the car lifts off the tummy-bumps, remember them on the Clough and Comber roads?), you will almost never nearly not convince me, quite, that some small part of you (wheee! that reconfiguring of innards) that part of you conceives of this as home. The radio picks up the shipping forecasts – high winds for Doolin Bay – and salt shapes language on the oyster of your tongue.

Miriam Gamble

[billherbert23]

A The Poetry Review review

A The Poetry Review review

So complete is the lacuna created by the pandemic that, when it comes to the microcosm of poetry, entire books were swallowed up by it like Keaton’s famous shot in The General of the titular train steaming off the blown-up bridge. ‘Are you sure you want to use a, uh, real train, Mr Keaton?’ ‘Sure, it’ll look real-er that way.’ (This is my ever-so subtle way of saying, ‘Dear Reader, my book was…

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[seaanimalonland]

The Charming Nancy | Miriam Gamble

She is out there somewhere, creaking in the swell of the green lough water, oozing sugar and black-market nicotine into the river’s vein.

She stirs herself into my morning coffee; she is in the smell of money and clean cotton sheets. At night she sweats into my bones a sugar-island melody, her blanched dead rat- a-tatting on my dreams.

via @IMcMillan