A poem by Katy Evans-Bush

We tried to get Katy Evans-Bush on board for the inaugural Rogue Strands poetry reading, but a clash of dates meant that she was unable to make it. I was therefore delighted when we managed to sign her up for the second one on 28th November (see Facebook event here!).

Katy is charismatic. She's charismatic in person, in conversation and in how she reads her poems in public (I very much enjoyed hearing her when we both read at an Ambit launch a few years ago), but she's also charismatic on the page, and very few poets are capable of such a leap. Her lines brim with life, brio and elan, all in all a class act, as demonstrated by today's poem:

To the Sea Party

Go that far down and you’re moving through night:

you part the world’s lead-liquid atmosphere

thick with death and shit and flakings from above –

last particles of oxygen gasp and implode –

and see nothing. You’re blacked out past your red,

your bluey-grey, your scales or skin or frond.

Passing squid provide your only outerwear,

from who can say where.

Further down, the smaller crustaceans wear their day.

Phosphorescence flashes while they dance

like Gatsby in colour and never stop. The noctiluca

form in tiny shining swarms and are both canapé

and Chinese lantern. It’s their party. Down here

you eat the prey that shines, while you shine on your prey.

First published in Broken Cities (Smith-Doorstep, 2017).