Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Yona Harvey.
Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon & Leela Chantrelle

He Seems Different, 1999, from the series Soul Erased, Joyce Scott

High left corner zinnia sun
black and white above
the tilt and grin skeleton in
an x-ray purple shirtdress—:
Baby boy stands, already knee deep
in the hill, both feet in the grave,
a sack of bones with sweet straight teeth,
the pained grin of the mischievous
child. Curious tilt. Chubby cheeks &
forehead shine. Strange grey eyes.
The child who bites in the classroom.
Wants love but wants to sink his
no longer babyteeth into the subject.
He is the subject. He seems different.
Subject verb. Seeming looks like
enumerated bones. In future will he
be kept in a drawer? In future he
will be stored. ③ near the clavicle.
⑤ over the heart. The mountain holds
his feet. Little feet held in granite. Little
pelvis—: Little fish, what’s leftover
after dinner? Someone has eaten
the eye. Picked clean meal
of scrunch-nosed kora smile—:
discarded. Not cement shoes, but
still—

LVCS


The Starry Night

How little it takes to blend in,
To become a cloudy night,
To watch nipples turn into vague stars,
And toes curl into imitations of light-

To become a disappointment.
We so rarely wonder about the moon's neighbor. How does
The moon
Take up everything?

I turn how are you
Into a million different questions,
Into a conversation,
Into a cloudy night.
What was needy became a shooting star,
What was stumbling out of pain became the sunrise,
Became orange glimmers peeking out of something asking and waiting for the answer.
Why are so many people being killed,
Why am I not,
What is in this countryside night that allows me to survive?

I would like no permission,
I would like to be given nothing.
This telescope doesn't work;
There's nothing in the sky tonight.

LC
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Exterior head shot of Raymond Antrobus
"A Perseverance with Language"

Raymond Antrobus, recently named the 2019 Sunday Times/University of Warwick youngwriter of the year, discusses the loss of his father, owning his deafness and being added to the school syllabus. "I have been writing things down for as long as I can remember, [from] about six. In some ways, poetry is my first language and is the language I lean on, and always have done. It was an exercise in being still and gathering myself."

viaTHE GUARDIAN
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Cover of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
What Sparks Poetry:
Mathias Svalina on William Blake's "The Tyger"

"Maybe my dedication to poetry....this desire to manufacture transcendences out of words, is just chasing this first high of visionary realization & its predicating brain chemistry. One moment you can be a child in a classroom, terrified & trapped, & then you read the right words, & you are free. It’s true. Freedom is real. Art is true. And once you know a true thing, it is difficult to un-know."
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